






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



Shelf._.AS__ 



UNITE© STATES OF AMERICA. 








LITERARY ART 



CONVERSATION 



A Painter, a Poet and a Philosopher 



JOHN ALBEE 






■^ACUSh- 



NEW YORK 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

1881 



?r 



K 



Copyright : 

1881. 

JOHN ALBEE. 



The scene of the conversation is the margin of 
the Concord River ; the time, a summer, not long 
past ; and the speakers three : a Painter, a Poet, and 
a Philosopher. These three grew up in the country 
together, went to the same school, academy, and 
finally, college, maintaining their friendship then 
and subsequently, unbroken. For upon entering 
life they had followed different vocations, painting, 
teaching, and farming ; and no one of them had as 
yet become so celebrated or prosperous as to make 
him forgetful of the other. 

Almost in their boyhood they had heard some- 
thing, but indistinctly, of a new movement in 
thought and philosophy, which at college they 
came to know more fully of. But, never had they 
visited the seat of the new ideas until the present 



time ; when, in a summer vacation, they make to- 
gether a pilgrimage to Concord ; and having seen 
the famous men and monuments of the town, they 
come in the afternoon to the bank of the river. 
There, near the Old Bridge, under the pleasant 
shady trees, they sat down, and fell into the con- 
versation, which I, happening to be the guest of one 
of them in his own home, whom it was awkward to 
leave behind and scarcely less so to take, having 
none of their associations or curiosity, listened to 
in silence, have remembered for a long time, and 
now attempt to relate. 



Literary Art, 



A CONVERSATION 

BETWEEN 

a Painter, a Poet, and a Philosopher. 



painter. 
At length we have seen the place about 
which, twenty years ago, we used to speak 
and think so much. You remember at the 
country academy where we then were, what a 
faint but awakening breeze was wafted from 
the Concord plain to us, and how it stirred us 
by its strange and indistinct whisperings ; as 
the half-grown plumage of the young bird is 

3 



4 LITERARY ART. 

ruffled before he has learned to beat up the 
wind. Our free minds were excited by the 
little we could hear or read of the new 
intellectual activity. And often we talked 
of a pilgrimage hither, to drink at the foun- 
tain, and hear with our own ears the ora- 
cles. But, just as the ideas of which we had 
heard were magnified in our minds because 
we had few others with which to compare 
them ; so the distance, which was only a good 
day's walk, seemed immense, because in an 
unfamiliar direction, and — because we had 
never traveled so far — almost another country. 
We never adventured into the longed-for 
land ; but it, and all we supposed it contained, 
remained a fruitful image, continually enlarg- 
ing and invigorating our minds. Youth is 
modest also, and dares not come boldly into 
the presence of what it most loves ; knowing 
it has little to give, it usually shrinks from 
those toward whom it is most drawn, and 
from whom it is receiving most. It cherishes 



LITERARY ART. 5 

their images in silence and meditation, and 
completes its growth at the root before it 
shoots into the outer air its more sympathetic 
blossoms. 

POET. 

We who were born on the other side of the 
Concord water-shed have been compelled to 
wander by a more circuitous route to philoso- 
phy and poetry than those to whom this re- 
gion is native. 

From village to village, first as schoolboys, 
then as winter schoolmasters along the mar- 
gin of the Charles, we came nearer and nearer 
to its mouth and the seats of culture, finally 
reaching and staying too long at Cambridge, 
vainly hoping to realize the usual dreams of 
early youth. But, ascending the neighbor 
river, we found, at last, the discipline and light 
we had been in ardent pilgrimage and appren- 
ticeship for, very near the point of our depar- 
ture ; and discovered too late how much better 
it would have been to have climbed the inter- 



6 LITERARY ART. 

cepting hill, than to have descended through 
the plain. Before the time of railroads, the 
inhabitants of river courses moved to their 
sources or mouths, exploring but a little way 
from either bank. We knew, at first, no other 
than the common highway of our fathers 
and neighbors ; and the highway is best as 
long as you only want what is upon it. 
When one finds he has other unforeseen neces- 
sities, it is more profitable to turn a short 
angle, and take a mountain trail, or even to 
mark out one for the first time. 

We three have been forced to wander far 
and ' long for our natural heritage ; sometimes 
through customary paths, more often untried ; 
without encouragement, until we no longer 
needed it, and always richer in hope than pos- 
session. But we were never happier, it seems 
to me, than when we had least ; when we set 
to our own music our favorite poetry, or 
wrote new verses to old tunes ; looked at the 
stars through a home-made telescope ; aston- 



LITERARY ART, 7 

ished ourselves with wonderful discoveries of 
the well-known, and speculated on all things 
above and below. 

PAINTER. 

You well portray our youthful, strenuous 
days. Romantic they well might be called ; 
but we escaped the sentimental, for we had 
nothing to do with the other sex. 

POET. 

That was our good fortune, since that would 
have drawn us inevitably into the world ; and 
it is better for youth to remain in the shade. 

PAINTER. 

Yes ; we were almost too sober and recluse. 
Our Puritan blood, which has always clogged 
our movements, would have been improved 
and accelerated by wine and women ; but we 
did fill ourselves with the third prescribed 
stimulant, song. 



8 LITERARY ART. 

POET. 

Doubly fortunate! That habit contracted 
in youth never leaves us. The others may 
satiate and weary ; or, if they remain, remain 
to our cost. 

How agreeable are all those trifles we look 
back upon. Others may prize us for more 
mature achievements ; we prize ourselves most 
for finding the paths that led to them. I have 
tried to say the same thing in verse. If you 
would like — 

PAINTER. 
Of course ; I knew by your manner you 
were coming to what you supposed was a 
good thing. What a pity artists cannot cap- 
ture unawares a spectator. But let us have it. 

POET. 

In spring we wear a green and leafy suit, 
If happily the muse permit her light ; 

Then flowers, and last of all, for others, fruit ; 
But most the leaf and flower ourselves delight. 



LITERARY ART. g 

PAINTER. 

That is enough. It was just as good in prose, 
I think. Let us stick to prose ; interjected 
poetry is an unfair advantage, is apt to put out 
every light, even when a quotation. 

I should like to know how it seems to you, 
now that we are actually here on the very 
shore of the river, beholding the meadows 
and the nearer and more distant hills ; is it all 
we fancied the score of years ago ? 

POET. 

I was thinking not so much of the place, 
which you always desire to paint first, as of 
the genius that is said to inhabit here, and 
from what source, whether that or some other, 
came the valor and love of freedom shown by 
those ancient men who once lived here such 
lowly lives, and at yonder bridge fought so 
bravely ; and how it was that our golden age 
of literature followed, as has usually happened 



I0 LITERARY ART, 

among all most famous nations, soon after 
some great struggle for freedom. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I think the Minute Man explains it. Look 
in his face ! The sculptor has made him an 
idealist, a poet. And such he was at heart, 
but of a new type. For he wished to experi- 
ment in a new world, without traditions. And 
he was willing to begin first with nature. But 
his descendants living in peace and comfort, 
have carried on the same aims into a world of 
ideas, whither indeed all real force tends from 
the beginning. 

POET. 

Do you think then poetry has its root in the 
love of freedom ? and in rather circumscribed 
situations ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 
No ; not always. It has sometimes flour- 



LITERAR Y ART. n 

ished vigorously in despotisms, where the des- 
pot was himself a cultivator of letters; but only 
for a generation, not being a growth out of the 
popular heart and institutions, but an isolated 
flower, usually transplanted from some foreign 
field, for the delight and ornament of a small 
circle. 

On the other hand, you remember the strug- 
gle of the Greeks against Persian subjuga- 
tion produced a whole garden of such flowers, 
continuing for many seasons, and never entire- 
ly dying out to the latest times. Even now, 
travelers say, one may recognize at Delphi and 
other places, some signs of that old garden. 
You know how long after the house is gone 
a few half wild plants still mark the site. 

POET. 

But are they not to be detected more abun- 
dantly about the houses of many Roman and 
modern poets? They seem to me not to have 
ceased at all, but to be flourishing in all their 



12 LITERARY ART. 

earliest luxuriance. Some of the growths, in- 
deed, are new, and the manner of treatment, 
the form, the coloring, are our own. Yet, 
after all, there is more identity than novelty. 
And as for language, one sometimes wearies 
of tropes and phrases repeated by everybody 
who is remembered through three thousand 
years. This anthology is scarcely added to 
from age to age. There appears to have been 
the same seed distributed everywhere ; each 
new planter glories in his crop ; but crops 
cannot well be compared while growing, only 
after the harvest. The season, the soil, the 
cultivation, produce nothing new, save more 
succulent or meagre fruits. 

PAINTER. 

Your own language shows the poverty of 
which you complain. Your comparisons are 
not new, I venture to say, although I cannot 
distinctly recall the original of them ; but they 
sound familiar enough. In truth, I read hardly 



LITERARY ART. 



13 



any books of late that do not seem to repeat 
each other in their better portions, that is, 
where they speak the inmost heart of man. 
Then they say the same things I wish to say, 
and what is probably latent in all human beings. 
It is a little larger utterance than we are capa- 
ble of, yet soon grows familiar; indeed, after 
many repetitions, and having fallen by adverse 
fate into the hands of preachers and newspa- 
pers, becomes so mutilated and hollow, we turn 
from it in disgust. You know I am fond of the 
sea-shore in winter. Then the idlers are gone 
where they can again be comfortable, and the 
sea and shore have all the lonely grandeur 
which is their peculiar property on the New 
England coast. Walking there every day I 
often see old footprints that look remarkably 
large and strange, as if some of the ocean 
gods had been up and down the beach ; but, 
reflecting, I know they are my own, enlarged, 
and the individual outline a little obliterated 
by some chance eddy of the tide. We are 



14 LITERARY ART. 

always rediscovering ourselves. Either we 
once lived and conversed with some whom we 
read, or they come back to think their thoughts 
in us. One forgets the writer's own interpola- 
tions, but carries from book to book those old 
ideas and figures, without which they would 
all of them pass into oblivion. 

I wish you, poets and philosophers, would 
try to invent something new. You have free- 
dom, which you think essential, though I do 
not ; and you have a larger audience than ever 
before. 

POET. 

Larger it may be, but not so select. And 
in the modern audience every one writes. Our 
army is all officers. The standards are vari- 
ous, opinions conflicting ; and you are exposed 
on all sides to a multitude that believes itself 
to know your business as well as you do your- 
self; any 'prentice hand can write a critique 
and make or mar your fortune for the mo- 



LITERARY ART, 



15 



ment. I understand Milton's regret that he 
wrote certain of his works in the vernacular. 
There ought to be a special vehicle of commu- 
nication between those who are interested in 
the highest subjects. 

PAINTER. 

Perhaps there is. I have heard of several 
volumes nobody could read but the writer and 
his followers. However, the path of the writer 
is plainer than that of the painter. I say noth- 
ing of the sculptor's, since that is absolutely 
closed. We must not imitate, and the conven- 
tional subjects are outworn. Little is left in 
nature to depict ; even she must be dressed 
out after some prevalent fashion ; yesterday 
with servile fidelity, to-day with a generalized 
impression. The very best we can do is to 
follow on after the poet and novelist or histo- 
rian, endeavoring to fix some moment of their 
records. We must paint what people are 
already interested in ; and almost all now im- 



j6 literary art, 

bibe their higher intellectual interests through 
literature. All we can do, therefore, is to 
stop at some famous place, enlarge or particu- 
larize it, and be humble interpreters to our 
masters; holding a candle to the objects over 
which their full sun has once passed. This is 
because everybody reads books. Formerly 
people read works of art too ; and many could 
read nothing else, reading with the eye. In- 
deed, I believe the visual organ for art and the 
auricular for oratory are nearly lost. We have 
substituted reflection. We are taught that 
man is the measure of everything, and every 
man that measure ; and all that is sensuous is 
frowned down as wanting the refined, ideal 
characteristic. 

POET. 

Your grievance sounds suspiciously per- 
sonal. Take care not to generalize from any- 
thing you have yourself suffered. The world 
immediately detects the tone of the unsuc- 



LITERARY ART. 



17 



cessful ; and it stops to listen only to the 
more fortunate. But I know what you mean : 
you have no mythology at your back, no 
courtly nor rich patrons, and, worst of all, no 
idle populace to stop and admire. 

PAINTER. 

Yes ; we want all those as provocatives. 
We want subjects people believe in, call it 
mythology or what you please ; we want re- 
wards, not always golden ; there are hand- 
some women, pleasant houses overhung with 
laurel, cellars rich in old wine. And who can 
paint or sing without admiration? Even 
philosophers are not as harsh and crabbed as 
their philosophy ; some of the elder ones were 
lovers and nearly all poets, and only distin- 
guished from other men by their immense fond- 
ness for flattery. Formerly men alone studied 
philosophy ; but now as many women ; in con- 
sequence the philosophers are twice as happy, 
and put all the more sand into their ropes. 



1 8 LITERAR Y AR T. 

For my part I never now talk with ladies over 
twenty years of age ; from sixteen to twenty 
you hear something light and fit to unbend 
the mind with ; later all is pathetical or eth- 
ical ; nothing less than space and time, immor- 
tality and self-determination, or at the very 
least, schemes of philanthropy, are reckoned 
not frivolous. 

POET. 

Will the philosopher defend himself, or call 
upon his friends ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

It is easy for either. I admit we are men. 
We pass through common experiences, but 
unlike some we do not stick fast in them. 

Most possess them as baggage, dragging 
them along behind, often retreating under 
their cover ; avowing them their sole defence 
in every novel situation. I observe that our 
artist, whose last picture is so much praised, 



LITERARY ART. 



19 



has put his light in the same spot as in the 
former, and in many other respects it is a copy 
of the same. And why? Because the former 
picture was successful. Experience showed 
him so much — not any new light. He fell 
back upon himself at a lucky point, as the 
generality do. There is nothing for us who 
speculate but to go forward in search of pure 
reason and final causes. We know they are 
unattainable, but not unapproachable ; and we 
expect with that mark to come nearer than on 
those short lines that are forever crossing each 
other, doubling back upon themselves, because 
they find some pleasant shade where it is easy 
and sweet to rest. 

Experience is sometimes tragic, interesting, 
agreeable; but never known in its moment. 
We are just too late to be wise. It is too 
much a matter of memory ; and like memory 
we have not enough of it in youth, and 
too much in age. If we could cast it off we 
might not augment our intellectual resources, 



20 LITERARY ART. 

but we should greatly disencumber our intui- 
tions. 

The truth for which we are in search is pro- 
gressive, and has few or no burdens to carry, 
and needs not to rest. We leave experience 
behind ; we are not listening for plaudits, and 
we follow humble employments for the sake of 
independence. Do not mistake our somewhat 
fixed and arbitrary nomenclature for the circle 
in which you charge us with moving. We 
have too much neglected the proprieties and. 
elegancies of language, intent on what we 
thought more important. Yet there is a cer- 
tain danger to the philosopher in a too choice 
phraseology, and in taking the imagination for 
a companion. These may allure him or his 
disciples to stop at some half truth for its 
beauty, instead of pressing on to the point 
where all truth and all beauty blend. 

No doubt our feminine followers, with their 
more rapid insight, have seen under our awk- 
ward speech our earnest design ; and we take 



LITERARY ART. 21 

their interest, not as flattery of ourselves, but 
homage, in common with our own, for noble 
studies. Those who respect the same things 
must necessarily respect each other. 

Perhaps one of the causes why men have 
never yet propounded nor reached an ade- 
quate or permanent philosophical system has 
been because few women have had any in- 
terest or share in that pursuit. Several phi- 
losophers, it is true, both among the ancients 
and moderns, have attributed to some woman 
their wisdom. The Sphinx was a woman; 
there was a succession of inspired ones at 
the Grecian oracular seats ; Socrates knew a 
certain wonderful Diotima. Later, there were 
two famous women among the Gaulish tribes, 
worshipped for a long time after death as 
divinities; and two are still living, their de- 
scendants, to whom their husbands, distin- 
guished in philosophy, rendered the credit of 
having promoted the whole and contributed 
the better half of their work. These, how- 



22 LITERAR Y ART. 

ever, are exceptions. Sanctity and passion 
have hitherto been their sphere. St. Beuve 
says we do not write the biography of a 
woman ; it is included in that of man. But 
why, if men and women must be united in 
everything else perfectly to complete their 
several destinies, is it not likely that such stud- 
ies as philosophy ought to be pursued con- 
jointly by them ? For is it not probable that 
some things are revealed to women of which 
men must be ignorant and in need? Our fore- 
fathers in the woods of Germany thought so, 
and Tacitus named it prescience. After many 
centuries, during which both sexes have been 
much softened, we have refined that descrip- 
tion into a more general ; and we try to find 
in want of depth, grasp, continuity, or what- 
ever else, something with which to balance the 
account. The history of woman in our race is 
different from that in any other. Very early 
she had the same laws as man, shared his pur- 
suits of war and peace, and sometimes directed 



LITERARY ART. 



23 



them. In the future she will help to solve all 
problems, approaching them from that point 
of view made plain and necessary to her by 
her nature. I think, therefore, we ought to 
admit her now to the study of philosophy, 
through which we hope to unlock all knowl- 
edge, in order to combine the whole of human 
force and insight for finding out a path for our 
arduous but sublime enterprise. 

PAINTER. 

Well ! I hear for the first time from a philos- 
opher language I can understand. I wish 
you would put some of it into your lectures. 
And when you have acquired a comprehen- 
sible vocabulary, why not go on and learn the 
whole of the literary art ? I am sure that is 
what you will find necessary if the ladies join 
in your studios, for they tolerate no obscurities, 
no awkwardness where they come ; and I shall 
not begrudge them to you if that should be 
the consequence. Whether they are about to 



24 LITERAR Y AR T. 

join your ranks I am uncertain. We should 
certainly miss their admiration and their ad- 
mirable presence in our studios, and I am 
piqued when I think of that loss. But how- 
different are the purposes for which you sup- 
pose you need them ! We want them for a 
quite human, personal effect — inspiration, if 
you can pardon so lofty a word. We like a 
little also to study their light and shade, their 
graces and movements, and even their cos- 
tumes, in which they are sometimes them- 
selves artists. But you require them for the 
impersonal, the rational, the pure intellect ; 
and on the whole, I think you will fail of draw- 
ing many to your pursuits. 

Now, I have a proposal to make you, in be- 
half of myself and the poet — he does not know 
what it is, but I am sure of his assent. You 
will observe how well I heeded what you said, 
and how aptly I am able to connect two parts 
of your speech with a third conclusion of my 
own. You admitted, after speaking of ex- 



LITERARY ART. 



25 



perience in a manner too oracular for me, that 
your present literary style in philosophical 
composition was not commensurate with the 
importance of its themes ; was a rather con- 
tracted and poorly equipped vessel to sail such 
deep, illimitable seas as you proposed to trav- 
erse, and you implied that one might neglect, 
at least for a time, literary ait, to gain first 
some worthy product to exercise it upon. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

You put it in your fine manner ; but that is 
nearly what I meant. 

PAINTER. 

Then you presented the lofty and novel ar- 
gument for the admission of women to the 
study of philosophy. As I have hinted, I do 
not think you will attain the end you proph- 
esy, the final philosophy; but my plan is 
to lend you the women who have so largely 
assisted the poet in his singing and me in 



26 LITERARY ART. 

painting, until they shall have taught you 
some of the arts of literature and the use of 
language. 

When you are entirely accomplished you 
may return them, or most likely they will re- 
turn of themselvesj 

POET. 

I agree to the proposal, but should like some 
period set to their sojourn, or who will be left 
to read my next volume ? 

PAINTER. 

You need not be apprehensive. They are 
quick to learn, as well as rapid teachers ; and 
for that to which their natures are responsive 
they will come back uncalled, and again and 
again. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

First, let us see if there be any such thing 
as literary art ; next, if we conclude that there 
is, let us examine what it consists in, and of 



LITERARY ART. 



27 



how much importance. Then the philoso- 
phers will be able to determine whether they 
will invite women among them merely as cos- 
tumers for their negligent stage, or as having 
some coordinate gift, most necessary for the 
winning of complete and harmonious wisdom. 

POET. 

I do not like that way of beginning the dis- 
cussion ; I already hear the clash of argument 
and syllogism on this picturesque river bank. 
The day is too fine, and the spot too peaceful 
for such sounds. All things seem to be in 
harmony. Nature herself will take part in 
our conversation if we do not hold our heads 
too closely together. 

PHILOSOPHER. 
What would you have ? 

POET. 

Let each one give his experience and obser- 
vation and study ; and whatever any others 



2 8 LITERARY ART. 

have spoken worthy of being recalled let us 
not forget that. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Thus we might reap over a large ground of 
good wheat ; but, if we did not also bind it up, 
how could we save or carry it away with us 
from the field ? 

PAINTER. 

Do not imagine you can carry any out of 
Concord ; it has long been garnered and 
threshed over and over. 

POET. 

There will always be a secret bond between 
what is true or beautiful, however scattered 
and diverse the sources from which it arise, 
and a conspiring, silent union. The Greek 
proverb says " One daw alights with another 
daw." Does this river seem to you motion- 
less? Does it seem to you one might steer his 
boat over its surface by his will, as Thoreau 



LITERARY ART. 



2 9 



believed, so little resistance has its current? 
There are those who say it is impossible to tell 
which way it flows; but they have never 
looked deeply into it. The surface may not 
reveal it until you drop something upon it or 
examine its bed. It is flowing to join all the 
other rivers of the world. 

So we shall not need logical order and a 
swift conclusion to unite our several utter- 
ances, if only we are fortunate enough to float 
ourselves on some stream that has, however 
slow or long, a course to the sea. 

PAINTER. 

I warn you, Mr. Philosopher, that this is 
only a pretty, flourishing pretext for the intro- 
duction of his note-books, of which his pockets 
are stuffed full. Coming to this town he 
thought he must be in fashion. For they say 
here that the waste-book makes the day-book, 
the day-book, the ledger ; and that thus litera- 
ture is produced in the most abundant and 
natural manner. 



30 LITERARY ART, 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Well, let us exercise both kinds of state- 
ment, the rational and orderly, and — what 
shall we call the other ? 

PAINTER. 

Dithyrambic, or irregular, I suppose ; the 
irregular being all that is regular with some 
men, poets, essayists, and others. 

POET. 

Why do we need any rubrics at all ? They 
are fetters to the imagination ; keep us in 
the middle of the road, when there are so 
many flowers along the walls, so many inviting 
by-paths. 

PAINTER. 

A mere apology for poetry ! and I foresee 
w r e shall have to spend the remainder of our 
lives here. Is this the place where it is always 
afternoon ? where the philosophic circle can 



LITERARY ART. 3 1 

be slowly measured? where the poet's short 
flights may return to the same bough ? If so, 
I insist we ascend yonder hill where there is a 
breeze stirring ; and where, at least, we may 
catch a glimpse of the reasonable, if we do not 
grasp it. 

POET. 

We came here in hope to breathe in some 
wisdom, not to flourish our own. And why 
need we be in haste ? Either you or the Phi- 
losopher mentioned the Sphinx awhile ago. 
She sat out a great many afternoons, serene 
and slow. But I remember also that CEdipus 
was lame of both legs, which shadows forth 
with what deliberation he went about solving 
the riddle. It was a contest of slowness, one 
might say; and GEdipus was victorious be- 
cause he was the slowest. 

PAINTER. 

More classics and antiquities, and no pro- 
gress ! Do you know that now, even in the 



32 LITERARY ART. 

colleges, classical allusions are thought a little 
boyish and cheap ? 

POET. 

Yes ; I know they are out of fashion every- 
where except in France, whence may they at 
length return to us, accompanied by some 
other good French fashions, wit, story-telling, 
and a real, not factitious, interest in literature. 

PAINTER. 

I like French wit and French art. 

They smack of the time. True descendants 
of the Greeks they think themselves, and I 
concede it, not so much on account of their 
matter as their manner. Always those who 
inherit employ more gracefully and naturally 
their possessions than the parvenu, the 
merely learned, the archaeologist, who, I don't 
know how, seems never able to handle the 
mouldy lumber of antiquity, but introduces it 
as a stranger in a company which cannot 
speak his tongue, nor he theirs, embarrassing 



LITERARY ART. 



33 



everybody but the introducer, who puts on an 
air as if he had done something wonderful. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

You think then those that write must be 
careful to observe such proprieties as are in 
favor with their own times and race and with 
those who are likely to be their readers? 

PAINTER. 

Yes ; for what other purpose do you write 
than to instruct or delight those who must 
certainly be your audience, if you are to have 
any ? I never have heard of but one author 
who hated the public so much, he dreaded 
writing in a style to please it, although many 
have affected a disdain they could not really 
have felt. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

You would then accommodate your style 
and subjects to the level of their capacities 
and interests? 
3 



34 



LITERARY ART. 



PAINTER. 



By all means ; how else will they hear ? 

I call that successful literary art which 
adapts itself so to the reader's conditions that 
he knows all that is said ; or, he has heard of 
others who know. Literary art must follow 
the tone, the standards, the spirit of the time; 
or else, I hold it is no art, but caprice, an idio- 
syncrasy. 

POET. 

What deliberate degradation is that ! If 
you intend to lead our inquiries in such a di- 
rection, we ought first to say something about 
the merits of idealism and realism. 

PAINTER. 

No ; we will leave that battle to the Parisian 
critics and novelists. Do you know how many 
copies of M. Zola's last book were distributed 
in a single day? That shows what people 
want. I wish we had such a public, or rather 
such writers. 



LITERARY ART. 



POET. 



35 



Not at all; the French people bought and 
read the book, not because they have a spe- 
cial appetite for that kind of literature, but 
because they are interested in the controversy 
going on in regard to it and wish to form an 
opinion themselves. I, indeed, wish we had 
such a public, not with a taste for the produc- 
tions of the realists, but having an admirable 
curiosity and genius competent to render a 
verdict in literary appeals. 

PAINTER. 

You idealists are neither satisfied with what 
is nor with plans for mending it. Some of 
you want the ripe fruit to hang on the tree all 
the year round ; others desire only the flower. 
So you are always living either in the past or 
in the future, never at the moment of growth, 
of earnest labor among the sprouting vines 
and the young stocks. Our public is good 
enough, interested enough, competent enough 



36 LITERARY ART. 

in its own productions and producers. Be- 
sides, it is our own, and we are its. The 
window is always large enough for one person 
to look out of, seeing more than he is seen ; 
but if you wish the world to see more of you, 
enlarge your window, and perchance you will 
also let in more light and prospect. 

It is in vain to be cosmopolitan before we 
are even provincial, to obtain a whole success 
before a half, or a quarter of one. What you 
long for, if you do not find here, you will not 
find elsewhere. Europe does not make one 
cosmopolite, but an inward creative faculty 
touches the walls of the world from its own 
centre without locomotion. It touched them 
from a square mile or two in Greece, from 
Florence, from Weimar; it still does from 
Paris, and it may here. 

I know not what you would have. Haw- 
thorne's world was large enough. His power- 
ful, steady light, shining, it is true, into some 
very contracted regions, yet would have been 



LITERARY ART, 



37 



entirely dissipated if carried about in quest 
of some world-wide pinnacle. He hung it 
where its radiance penetrated familiar scenes, 
and trimmed it with his own oil ; and never 
were we aware by what riches we were sur- 
rounded until we looked upon them by that 
lamp. 

And you complain that there is no career, 
no public, and no actor ! All that is left us 
is to sit down at the second table of some 
Greek banquet, or curse the stars that did not 
allot our career in the French capital. Only 
yesterday I saw your latest lament of this 
kind, in the weekly organ of all that is un- 
American. I suppose you have the paper in 
yaur pocket ? 

POET. 

I ? no ; I have not even seen it, and do not 
care to. For I never print anything I do not 
wish to recall ; not, however, on account of 
the matter, but the workmanship. 



38 LITER AR Y AR T. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I think I can help you ; I was reading the 
paper this morning, and when we started I 
wrapped up some fishing-lines in it. 

POET. 

Such is the ignominious, last use of all our 
efforts ! 

PAINTER. 

Do not be depressed. Besides leading pub- 
lic opinion as they pretend, the big mendaci- 
ties serve various other indispensable uses. 
What they say when they advertise, that no 
family can well be without them, is true. For 
what should we put under carpets, or how 
wrap a bundle ? I know a gentleman who 
takes in the largest that is printed — size is his 
criterion — and he says that it is good practical 
economy, and saves him money in kindlings 
and wrappages every year. 



LITERARY ART. 



39 



POET. 

But what did you expect to catch here with 
your fishing-lines ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 
I had a great curiosity to see a horn-pout. 
They say evening is the best time to angle for 
them ; but I thought we might entice one at 
least upon the hook with a fat grub from my 
garden, about the only thing it is producing 
enough of this year. 

PAINTER. 

I am amused at your curiosity. They are a 
disgusting little fish ; they live at the bottom 
of the river rather than in its stream, and al- 
ways seem to me a piece of organized mud. 
However, they can inflict a pretty severe wound 
with a sharp horn concealed somewhere in their 
pectoral fin. This you must look out for, if 
you chance to bring one ashore ; for when he 
feels the fresh smart of the hook while you try 
to disengage it, he will prick back in the most 



40 



LITERARY ART. 



adroit manner. Its nature, you see, shares the 
characteristics of its abode. Blue-black when 
young, and when full grown dingy black, 
slimy, half blind, and wide-mouthed, it is the 
very antipode of the lively, opalescent sun-fish. 
And yet you always find them together, one 
near the surface, poising with intense stillness, 
the other wriggling uneasily at the bottom. I 
wonder at your choice of the ugly pout. 

POET. 

This is one of those creatures that has never 
much ascended in the scale of being, and is 
contented with itself and its habitat. I ob- 
serve the lower the organization the more 
satisfied and mechanical it appears to be. It 
seems to have nothing to reach out with, and 
no object to reach for; but often, like the 
pout, a horn or some other contrivance, with 
which to maintain its condition ; for I think 
the real use of the pout's horn is not so much 
that of a weapon of defence as a pin with which 



LITERARY ART, 



41 



to fasten itself into the muddy bed and banks 
of the river. It seems to me to resemble won- 
derfully those men who are happy with things 
as they are, their own situations and the 
world's ; whom nature has furnished with just 
some prehensile or viscid mental organs suita- 
ble for a stationary existence. 

PAINTER. 

If one has fins he must swim, if wings, let 
him fly ; but if only tentacles, then he must 
stay where he finds himself. I believe as much 
of evolution as that one is being transformed 
into the other. Fins and feathers are the same 
word ; the action and result the same. The 
difference is only in the elements in which 
they operate. But the resemblance is so close 
as to make the transformation easy of belief. 
Throughout nature there is such similarity of 
structure that it only needs a very little change 
of conditions, wants or will, for one form to 
pass, to descend or ascend into some other. 



42 



LITERARY ART. 



But I did not mean to wait so long for those 
dolorous verses, which it appears came here 
with the philosophic fisherman. Will you 
hand them to the poet and let him read ? 

POET. 

No ; you shall read them yourself. I should 
like to hear if they sound through your voice 
as they did once in my ears without a voice. 
Usually that is a mortifying test. But I am 
ready. 

PAINTER — Reads : 

Ages ago the larger, riper fruit 

Which crowned the topmost boughs of those fair trees 

That in Hesperides stood thick and tall, 

Was plucked by elder poets in its prime, 

And through the orchard rose majestic hymns. 

Some windfalls here and there to us remain, 

For which we slender men must stoop, not climb ; 

Or shriveled crab among the lower limbs, 

The season's laggard, setting teeth on edge, 

More fit for vinegar than Chian wine, 

And puckering up the mouth in some shrill song. 



LITERAR Y AR T. 43 



PHILOSOPHER. 



Certainly that is not the voice of hope or 
tranquility. It is one that needs to be re- 
stored by a course in the philosophy of his- 
tory. 

PAINTER. 

It is just the spirit which leads men away 
from the present, the actual, in which they 
might find moderate contentment, into the 
contemplation of the remains of other lands 
and remote ages, where, overwhelmed with 
the prospect, and comparing it with their own 
restricted circle, they become incapable of 
performance, will not even enter the arena 
with their contemporaries ; but, sitting aloof, 
construct ideals, images made out of frag- 
ments of antiquity and dreams of futurity. 



PHILOSOPHER. 
What then shall we do with the past? 



44 



LITERARY ART. 



PAINTER. 



Forget it ; it was made to be forgotten ; 
made for itself, not us. 



PHILOSOPHER. 

Already you have insisted that we shall not 
look into the future ; and, according to your 
definition, the ideal is a sort of phantom-like 
Janus, one face looking far forward, the other 
as far backward, never conscious of that which 
is at its feet. 

PAINTER. 

Yesterday was the invention of the regret- 
ful ; to-morrow of the indolent. Who lives in 
either loses two days. The present is all that 
really is, and precisely the spot where we are 
the only tangible point of the universe. 

In my next vacation I mean to complete 
my " Poets' Almanac." I lay claim to little 
more than the general plan, but shall solicit 



LITERARY ART. 



45 



contributions written according to my idea. 
It is to be ingeniously contrived, so that the 
whole phenomena of the four seasons, and 
three hundred and sixty-five revolutions of 
the earth, shall appear complete and concen- 
trated into each day ; and whoever becomes 
accustomed to using it will not look upon time 
as passing, but an eternal present. I have 
already received one contribution; but only 
one or two passages suit the purpose. It 
may, however, amuse you and illustrate my 
design. I have no doubt the verses I am go- 
ing to read originated somewhere near this 
river, and so they may find their echo here. 



PHILOSOPHER. 

It seems to me you would make us like 
statuary, always doing the same thing ; which 
might be well, if like that we were fixed at our 
most beautiful, most active, or grandest mo- 
ment. 



46 



LITERARY ART, 



PAINTER. 



Yes ; that is precisely what I wish to accom- 
plish ; and what, in fact, would take place, 
were men so organized or educated that they 
could see but one object instead of a dozen. 

But hear what this writer of mine has to say 
of hfs year in comparison with that of other 
astronomical calculators. 

POETS' almanac. 

The gods to man give months and years 
For forethought and the ward of ill ; 

That, armed with active hopes and fears, 
He learn to master fate by will. 

For him are fruitful clouds and suns; 

From field to field, from plant to plant, 
He as their friendly shadow runs, 

And husbands well whatever they grant. 

He sows and reaps the earth's broad fields, 
Trusting to autumn springtime's care ; 

The season lost, no profit yields 
The year, and profitless is prayer. 



LITERARY ART. 

Let him be prudent then and wise, 
. Since for itself is not the day- 
Alone ; and no to-morrows rise 
On him who casts to-day away. 

May nature give him blest increase 
Who trusts her aid and lends his own ; 

And unto him who has no piece 
Of earth, be still some bounty shown. 

The muse gives only day and hour, 

Blind to the future or the past ; 
That poets, missing fortune's dower, 

May hold the present moment fast. 

But other grace the Parcas show 

The poet, doomed the world's wide steep ; 
He reaps the fields he does not sow, 

And sows where he will never reap. 

He counts that season's harvest good 

When verse in heat or cold waxed strong ; 

When day and night forgetful stood, 
And the whole year bore but one song. 



47 



48 LITERARY ART. 

Write, Muse, for him a calendar — 
The poet's own creative week ; 

When to his fiat is no bar, 

And clay is taught sweet words to speak. 



POET. 

To some men the past must be more attrac- 
tive than the present; to all there are mo- 
ments when the eye reverts, weary and dis- 
couraged with what thrusts itself into the 
day. According to their temperament some 
find comfort in the past, others in the future. 
Knowledge seems at least to have little to do 
with it ; for are not the ignorant also rather 
fond of dwelling upon the good old times? 
With them it is a curious but significant in- 
stinct. 

The more ardent souls who wish to better 
the times, and those calmer ones that perceive 
how ideas must run about in a certain wild, 
youthful career before they settle down into 
order and institutions, contemplate the future 



LITERARY ART, 



49 



ages with a more confident presage. Poetry- 
celebrates both the rising and setting sun. 
At mid-day, like the birds, it retires into the 
shade. At mid-day only the shriller sorts of 
insects sing. What voices scream in our ears 
from shop and street, from newspaper, politics, 
and the drawing-room ! You have heard my 
lament, forced from the heart of one trying to 
close his ears to them, trying to catch a higher 
if more distant strain, and you would pass a 
severe censure upon it. There are many 
moods : who lets any escape before grappling 
with it will understand the meaning of none. 
You yourself must have experienced the same 
emotion, if you do indeed ever turn your 
thoughts toward the past. 

PAINTER. 

I try to live with my contemporaries. They 
march light-armed. It is now pretty well 
known how many pounds* weight we can carry 



5o 



LITERARY ART. 



and not drop out of the lines. Therefore, if I 
see my companions throw away anything, I do 
the same, piece by piece ; for to sink by the 
wayside is to be quickly forgotten and utterly 
lost. But to strip one's self is of small ac- 
count ; if we can keep abreast our fellows and 
share in the victory, we shall more than repay 
ourselves from the spoils. 

But you are determined upon taking along 
all the useless trumpery you have collected in 
your life. I foresee you will be left behind ; 
and because I love you and have a lingering 
fondness for certain parts of your relics, I 
would even share some of your baggage. 
Come, shall I take the burden from your back, 
done up so squarely and labeled " dried apples 
from Hesperides;' , or shall I undo all that ele- 
gant furniture from your breast which you 
have prepared for housekeeping in the New 
Atlantis ? 



LITERARY ART. 



PHILOSOPHER. 



51 



I think you would do well to take either 
one. We always need something to steady 
and regulate our gait. 

POET. 

But I do not mean to part with anything. I 
never can tell what I shall want next, and I 
shall not put myself in uniform to advertise 
the company I keep. 

The arts which you both practice, the art of 
philosophizing and the art of painting, have in 
large measure their subjects already provided ; 
I must bring my own stuff and also the art. 
Therefore I need ampler scope, a larger outfit 
and a more leisurely journey. Let the fife 
and drum march at the head of the company ; 
in some solitary mountain the prophet must 
be consulted for the victory ; and on the tri- 
umphant return, the minstrel will recount the 
heroic deeds of their ancestors, celebrate their 
own and predict their children's. 



52 



LITERARY ART. 



PHILOSOPHER. 



You have at length come back, as near as 
your custom ever is, into the region of those 
inquiries I was most anxious to follow. Your 
rhetoric and continual metaphors quite be- 
numb me. I am not sure philosophers are 
not fortunate, after all, in their unornamented 
and Spartan coins of speech. For while lis- 
tening to you it seems to me like a shower of 
meteors ; one cannot see Avhere they come 
from, nor find the spot where they fall. 

PAINTER. 

A very pretty figure, showing the effect of 
good company ! With the ladies' help we 
shall soon change your Spartan currency to 
gold and silver. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Yes — unless we are very steady we uncon- 
sciously fall into our companions' tricks of 



LITERARY ART. 



53 



speech. But is it true, what the poet says of 
himself, namely, that he must invent his own 
subjects, and also, mainly, the art of investing 
them? 

PAINTER. 

I think it is likely the good poet does invent 
his subjects, inasmuch as he endeavors to find 
those so insignificant that his treatment gives 
to them their only importance ; for nothing in 
nature or life is of any value until it becomes 
the subject of reflection or imagination ; or else, 
those already so famous in history or fable that 
he must furnish out something so probable and 
apposite to their character that all men easily 
and with delight recognize it as what might 
have been justly the deed and the word. Now 
this elevation of the unknown and trivial into 
something beautiful or interesting, and the 
clothing of the better known and always sig- 
nificant in appropriate garments, these two ef- 
forts are probably what the poet means by in- 



54 LITERARY ART. 

venting his subjects. Is it not? or is the defi- 
nition too limited ? 



PHILOSOPHER. 

A definition never can be too limited ; its 
clearness and precision depend upon its limit. 
Men go on defining with increasing tenuity of 
language, because the first effort was not as 
clear as they wished to make it; or more likely 
on account of vague perceptions, and having 
added five or six, throw you the whole bundle, 
and tell you it is somewhere within, a nest of 
boxes, the last as empty as the first. The dic- 
tionaries put us off with synonyms — and pic- 
tures. Philosophy has few adequate ones ; 
mathematics many, and applicable over a wide 
field. A good definition is as useful as a prov- 
erb ; indeed, it often becomes one. 

You have made the poet's meaning clearer 
to me by yours ; now inform me something of 
what he calls his art. 



LITERARY ART. 



55 



PAINTER. 

Why, that is a part of these very things of 
which we have just spoken. When you have 
found out a method it becomes an art. But 
he mingles them unconsciously, and is the 
very last person from whom to seek any ac- 
count of himself. It requires the highest 
kind of genius, and perhaps not the happiest, 
to think and at the same time observe the 
processes of thought. This is what, I believe, 
some of you philosophers have attempted ex- 
periments in. 

Lately photography has succeeded in arrest- 
ing an image of objects in the most rapid 
motion, as race horses, so that we know 
what we have never known before, however 
near and intent the eye, the exact posi- 
tion of every limb and the appearance of 
every muscle, and can study them at leisure. 
In short, we have a picture of motion and ac- 
tivity, whereas before we have had only a 
symbol, an idea of them. What remains? 



56 



LITERARY ART. 



To determine the moment of chiefest expres- 
sion for detachment and representation, to 
detach it and give it an existence of its own. 
This is the aim of art. The expression ought, 
however, to suggest all that belongs to the 
subject both before and after it has been pre- 
cipitated into a single moment or form. It 
has been attempted successfully a few times : 
in the Laocoon, in the frescoes of Michael 
Angelo, and in several of the tragedies of 
the Greeks and of Shakespeare. It is this 
that in a peculiar manner allows us to read 
into certain creations so much of what we call 
the suggestive. It is truly the characteristic 
of all works that have seized the transcend- 
ent moment, the central idea, and neglected 
trifles. Even conspicuous actors and impor- 
tant actions must often be subordinated. In 
metaphysical inquiries you have blundered 
sometimes in determining at what place and 
instant to catch an image of human and 
divine being. For while you are watching, 



LITERARY ART. 



57 



thinking, and observing the operations of your 
own mind, which now, as it were, take the 
reins into their own hands and anon permit 
themselves to be guided, you become unable 
to obtain a connected answer from the elusive 
Proteus. So that I cannot blame you for 
assuming many points of departure, proving 
their validity by the issue of the arguments. 
The poet makes fewer mistakes, since he 
comes nearer to being, like the newly im- 
proved camera which I mentioned, capable of 
receiving and rendering instantaneous impres- 
sions. 

That which concerns literary art, the mould 
or form, comes as an attendant of all vivid 
ideas, and must by hard labor be carried on to 
completion for totality of effect. I suppose 
that is what Aristotle meant when he said 
that nature herself discovered the iambic 
measure, which is the foundation of all poetic 
measures. But he said it after it had been 
rescued from the satiric poets by the tragic, 



5 8 LITER A R Y ART, 

and had become polished and dignified ; and 
it very well illustrates the different offices of 
nature and art, and how they must supple- 
ment each other. 

It may appear to you that I am more con- 
versant with literary art than my own, but I 
have learned from much apprenticeship and 
many masters that they are one. Art makes 
us free to every special art. All the terms of 
each, all the aphorisms and axioms, are trans- 
ferable and usable in every other. Those 
who rely wholly upon nature, and are un- 
willing to be bound by law, become the slaves 
of caprice, and at length lose the power of 
producing anything worthy, under her ac- 
cidental and unregulated impulses. It is well 
said in art, no less than in religion, that the 
law makes us free. This was impressed upon 
me by my first master. For a long while, I re- 
membered his very words. But, after a time, 
influenced by other novel teachers, they nearly 
faded from my mind. Of late they come back 



LITERARY ART. 



59 



to me with renewed power, and I have nearly- 
recovered the whole of his wise instruction. 
He was accustomed to speak of art in litera- 
ture and music as often as in painting. By 
borrowing terms from each, he had made out 
an elaborate technical, critical vocabulary. 

He railed often at the increasing prevalence 
in literature of the ■ • undulating" style, which 
he described as that which rises and falls in 
agreeable or heavy monotony ; but moves not 
forward, gets nowhere, and, like music, raises 
hopes it never fulfills. 

He said, speaking of nature and art, that 
man was the middle term between them ; that 
he had nature behind him and art before him, 
the one his material, the other his product. 
The resemblance must be traced through man, 
not immediately to nature. The artist inter- 
venes to represent the contact of man and 
nature. The resemblance, if only realistic, is 
only vulgar — that which the uninitiated desire, 
see, and wonder at ; sparrows that fly at the 



60 LITERAR Y AR T. 

cherries in the picture; sheep that are so much 
like sheep, yet, after all, only sheep. Nature 
can make a better single thing than the art- 
ist can represent, and it is vain to compete 
with her in her own province. But let the 
artist arrange, discover, and bring together 
something inexpressible or only accidental to 
nature. Then is he man, the artist ; a being 
not superior to nature, but more universal and 
adaptive ; as an individual capable of making 
permanent his way of seeing objects, and of 
establishing a new relation of objects. 

He draws nature over into art. 

He does it not for nature's or art's sake, but 
to perfect himself. 

Nature passed through man's senses, heart, 
mind, in a word, being, is art. 

Nature is wholly perfect, but complex, tan- 
talizing, and elusive ; in studying and rep- 
resenting her, man solves many a mystery 
and finds unity ; and the imperfect but active 
being is able to construct through art forms 



LITERARY ART. 6 1 

something more complete than himself or 
nature, that is, ideals, by which, in turn, he is 
exalted and calmed. The uninitiated pass by- 
ideals ; they hold firmly to the actual which is 
familiar ; and it is their peculiarity to be blind 
and unobservant of natural objects, but re- 
markably quick to see and to require in art the 
most characteristic imitations of them. 

Thus often discoursed to me the old, severe 

master. 

POET. 

I am well satisfied ; and I feel how much 
we need the direction of such persons as you ; 
how much we require you to go between us 
and the public with your expositions and def- 
initions. However, I am not fond of defin- 
ing ; something escapes it after all ; something 
has to be done up in a separate bundle, left 
behind, or inconveniently taken along. But it 
is good the public should be led into narrower 
limits, that their minds may not be drawn off 
from some one valuable view to others so 



62 LITERAR Y AR T. 

distant and obscure, they will be almost cer- 
tain to be confused. Those photographs of 
race-horses in all the intense action of the 
course, remind me that something similar 
happens in inventions of the mind. Always 
enough is rushing through it and in front of 
it, but the instrument is seldom conveniently 
adjusted. Other affairs, a cloudy day, a trivial 
companion, mask the soul's mirror. When all 
is favorable, invention is easy and agreeable. 
Without effort we see the godlike in ourselves 
and everywhere, and can reproduce it as sim- 
ply as we see it. Afterward we must spend 
laborious days in perfecting our work in a 
dryer light. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Which do you call the literary art, the in- 
vention or the subsequent elaboration ? 

POET. 

Both; they are different functions of the 
same power ; as sculpture is an art involving a 



LITERARY ART, 



63 



distinct mental conception for whose realiza- 
tion the artist employs many merely mechani- 
cal contrivances. There is rough work to be 
done and finer ; but neither avail, though there 
be mountains of marble, without the plastic im- 
agination pre-sculptured with beautiful forms. 
What shapes slumber in stone ! What expres- 
sions in language ! 

PHILOSOPHER. 

If we agree that several other talents are 
requisite to accompany invention, still ought 
we not to give to the latter the first station in 
literary art, and is it not much the rarest and 
most excellent gift ? 

POET. 

By no means should we attempt to fix the 
rank among faculties so inter-dependent. 

Besides that, invention is much more com- 
mon than is supposed. How many tales and 
poems have we met that contained an excel- 



64 LIT ERA R Y ART. 

lent gift of this sort, but wanting in workman- 
ship. Especially now when the whole world 
is open to those in search of subjects. The 
copyright office and the patent office are full, 
the one of uncirculated books and the other 
of unemployed models ; good conceptions, but 
wanting in structural, organic force. Some 
affect to think this lack of little consequence, 
and that even the smallest amount of essence 
is to be more diligently sought after than su- 
perabundant body, which they call a mere ex- 
ternal, or wrappage, to divert or seduce the 
mind from its purpose. There was a monkish 
doctrine of this sort. And even Tertullian 
will not allow beauty to be anything more 
than " an additional outlay of the divine plastic 
art." Notice the word "additional" and how 
it degrades the sentiment. He might as well 
have said honestly and at once, superfluous. 
In literature sometimes one must praise the 
invention, sometimes the form ; if both, praise 
can go no farther. In masterpieces there is 



LITER AR Y ART. 65 

an equipollence of invention and plastic force. 
One age, even different readers, emphasize one 
or the other, deferring to some prevailing ten- 
dency or taste. 

At present, under the lead of certain French 
writers, and in curious accordance with the 
fashions of the time in some minor arts, we 
hear much about a good literary form. 

PHILOSOPHER. 
What do you mean by form in literature ? 

POET. 

All but the materials — to adopt an Aristo- 
telian definition which you admire. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But you would not have that stand for the 
whole of the literary art ? 

POET. 

By no means ; that must be all that is con- 
tained in the completed work ; all that makes 



66 LITER A R Y AR T. 

it what it is. Have we not already agreed 
upon so much ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Yes ; we have. But I am constantly afraid 
of losing you in some of those irresistible by- 
paths you are forever dashing into, just like 
my dog, who, while I wish to pace along the 
highway, scours every field and lane, yet never 
comes back with anything. I have named 
him the Canterbury Pilgrim, after that one of 
Chaucer's who seemed so much busier than he 
was. 

POET. 

Those who have a nose for scent must fol- 
low it. A false scent is only the game es- 
caped ; it was there once, there where the dog 
holds his head to the ground and runs swiftly, 
scarcely using his eyes. The pursuit is intoxi- 
cating even if futile. It brightens the eye and 
makes the breath deeper. I fancy it is as 



LITERARY ART. 



6 7 



profitable as carrying one's nose so high in the 

air. 

PAINTER to Philosopher. 

We shall make the poet a fine disputant if 
we keep on. He already knows how to parry, 
and he came very near a thrust ! 

PHILOSOPHER. 

He certainly has not learned from me. I can 
carry on a discussion very well, alone with my- 
self, but with others the thread slips out of my 
hand. One should be able to contend like an 
active soldier, advancing or retreating. Some- 
how I have lost the sense of wit and pleas- 
antry, and when they intervene, as is proper 
they sometimes should, I feel silenced. When 
I cannot study, as generally happens from the 
vernal to the autumnal equinox, I like better 
to saunter with my Canterbury Pilgrim, or 
angle in some still stream. 

But the afternoon is passing; I fear I shall 
carry home no fish, and between your two 



68 LITER AR Y ART. 

heads so full of miscellaneous wisdom I ought 
not to return without some sort of game. 

You know I have long wanted to examine 
the principles of literary art, to find whether 
philosophy ought to put herself under its di- 
rection when she wishes to communicate her- 
self to others. I know not if such a highly 
adorned and delicate contrivance would con- 
tain our somewhat slippery, evasive substance. 

PAINTER. 

Did you never hear of the Tasmanian water- 
basket, woven of slender twigs, yet tight, and 
thrice as light as a bucket ? At present you 
are handicapped by your philosophical nomen- 
clature ; you are lugging your precious water 
in too heavy a bucket ; it outweighs its con- 
tents ; it impedes yourself, and deprives others 
of the assistance they have a right to expect 
from you. A perfect art, or method, is 
wanted in every kind of intellectual exercise, 
that we may be free, light-armed, and swift ; 



LITERARY ART. 



69 



that where there^s matter there may be a con- 
structive power to render it effective. 



PHILOSOPHER. 

Is such a constructive power requisite in 
every species of composition ? 

PAINTER. 

I can think of no exception, not even gram- 
mar and other sorts of text-books. There 
ought to be thrown into them a seductive 
quality, making them pleasant to acquire and 
easy to remember. For we are so constituted 
that what we have liked we remember with 
little effort. Indeed, formerly, even text- 
books had a touch of fancy, and were in- 
tended to be attractive as well as useful. I 
am not given to overpraising antiquity, but 
the monks of Croyland and Glastonbury taught 
little Anglo-Saxon boys geography and arith- 
metic after a method not since surpassed. 
Listen : Wulfried, have you said your Pater 



JO LITERARY ART. 

Noster this morning? Yes, master. And are 
you happy this morning? Yes, master. Well, 
now then, come tell me what is the sea? 
Master, it is the road of the brave. Good, my 
lad, and may you never be a coward. But tell 
me why it is the road of the brave ? Master, 
it is because my ancestors were sailors, and 
they were brave men. The Lord be praised ! 
my children ; may you be brave men on sea 
and on land. 

Listen again : It is the nineteenth century ; 
its usual defender, your humble servant, is 
flourishing in a New England seaside village as 
a school committee. He visits the grammar- 
school. The school-house is on an eminence ; 
the- day is pleasant ; the windows are all open, 
and from every one the wide Atlantic can be 
seen. The children are sons and daughters of 
sailors and fishermen. The classes are called 
one after another. Not a question in book or 
from teacher nor an answer that could by any 
possibility arouse any slumbering faculty of the 



LITERARY ART. 



71 



human mind. The geography class is reciting. 
Listen again to the question, What is the sea ? 
Some are silent ; at last one is found who 
remembers the answer in the book — "A vast 
body of salt water/' Bravo ! The committee 
ventures to ask — What is it good for? There 
is no response. Knowing something of fish- 
curing, and adapting himself to the occupa- 
tions of the fathers of the scholars, he men- 
tions pickle as one of the uses of vast bodies 
of salt water. This appears to be compre- 
hended. He asks for the name of some " vast 
body of salt water." The Pacific Ocean is 
named. Then he tries to find out from- the 
class the name of the salt water to be seen in 
every direction from the schoolhouse. There 
is no answer. He appeals to the whole 
school. There is for once a painful stillness ; 
it become^ more and more oppressive, and he 
is ready to take back his question, ashamed at 
the shame which this revelation of ignorance 
brings upon the whole school. 



72 



LITERARY ART. 



It would be a vain effort either to find or to 
train teachers for the whole country. What, 
then, is the remedy? In part, to apply the 
highest principles of literary art in the making 
of text-books, and to intrust the work to men 
of genius, and philosophers who make the 
human mind a special study ; wresting that 
which is now the most villainous business in 
America, the manufacture of school-books, 
from its present hands. 

Does it not often happen that some teacher 
has the gift of rendering all studies, the dryest, 
entertaining to his pupils ? If there is a 
method found out by one or few, is it not 
possible to imitate it and even take such an 
accurate model into the limits of a text-book, 
that it may be of universal use and benefit? 
We err in making learning too exact and bare, 
and in expecting a full grasp and ready ap- 
plication of it. It is something laid away 
rather for the future, to fructify ; and we may 
expect it to bear beautiful but diverse fruit. 



LITERARY ART, 



73 



Is it not best, then, to find here an opportunity 
for literary art, in order to make knowledge 
very attractive even in its rudiments and first 
appearance to the child? 

We have in the country two ways of preserv- 
ing such delicacies as we wish to provide for 
the long winter season, the sweet and the 
sour. For one we use sugar, for the other vin- 
egar. That for children should be the sweet, 
both their bodily and mental diet. They 
require the saccharine in everything for a 
healthy growth, and filling up the tissues 
against the bitter infusions of after years. 
Soon enough they develop a taste for the 
acrid and stimulating. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

There is a partial truth in what you observe. 
But let us come out of the school-house into 
the private study. What shall we say? that 
here, too, we must be very careful to clothe 
our writing in agreeable forms when our pur- 



74 



LITERARY ART. 



pose is not so much to please as to investigate 
and instruct ? 

PAINTER. 

Never is there any loss in giving to things 
of greatest consequence to man the greatest 
advantage of every kind. Instruction in the 
disguise of delight has entered and subdued 
many a stubborn mind. Its own merits, for 
several pursuits besides philosophy, are an in- 
sufficient recommendation. There will always 
be some, however, for whom they are enough. 
There are those who seem even to enjoy the 
scantiness and iterations of your philosophical 
dialect. A gleam of imagination, an elegant 
and copious sentence would probably unfix 
their attention. Unlike other readers, they 
do not require many, but the least possible, 
variety of forms ; playing out the game, as it 
were, with a few, and the same counters to the 

end. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

And does not that seem to you the rational 



LITERARY ART. 



75 



method in such studies as ours ? We propose 
a problem ; we must, of course, employ some 
kind of signs. It is better they should be 
rather arbitrary or technical, seldom changed, 
their value always the same. We proceed 
step by step to the solution, eliminating on 
the way whatever is not concerned in that so- 
lution ; but, retaining the important factors 
throughout, we design to connect the begin- 
ning and all the intermediate parts with the 
conclusion in such clear and indisputable co- 
herence that the mind following the work 
may be assured of the truth. If we reach this 
result it should justify the means, although 
they may appear to you to be wanting in ar- 
tistic fitness. 

And as for the many being by nature or 
interest qualified for philosophy, it is to me 
doubtful ; but, that the many involuntarily 
share in the benefits which the study of phi- 
losophy prepares, is not at all in doubt. There- 
fore I do not think it necessary that we should 



7 6 



LITERARY ART. 



array it in fine garments and beat the drums 
before its door. Literary art must confine 
itself chiefly to that province which is for the 
intellectual playground of mankind. We come 
there sometimes to see the exercises of youth, 
and of those whose minds never, at any age, 
become mature ; we come to examine, to di- 
rect ; and we have often to reduce what ap- 
pears, at first view, spontaneous and without 
order, to system and law. Was it not conve- 
nient that we found out the unities? We did 
not invent them ; they sprang from the very 
nature of the ancient mind to which an anach- 
ronism or any disorder was inconceivable. In- 
vestigating their work we discovered the un- 
conscious laws w T hich controlled their efforts. 
If now all but unity of action happens to be 
discarded, and modern readers care little for 
congruity of time or place, so the sentiment 
or action please them, we turn ourselves again 
to the labor of formulating the more modern 
fashions of literature and art. And has it not 



LITER A R Y AR T. 77 

been well done by several philosophical critics? 
And although there never were before such in- 
dependent and seemingly lawless products of 
the human mind as to-day, yet we are not 
hopeless of finding some generalization which 
will enlighten and satisfy the minds of those 
who wish to know the significance of the mod- 
ern intellectual world. There are some to 
whom a demonstration in geometry has the 
same beauty and suggestiveness as the best 
verse of poetry to others. We must expect 
appreciation mainly from the former. 

In fine, we must be satisfied to deal with 
things rather than words ; and to be credited 
with an art which underlies all arts that win 
the applause of men. The many look upon us 
as busied about matters that do not concern 
their welfare or pleasures, not being able to 
perceive the unity which binds together human 
endeavors, because they are living at the cir- 
cumference rather than the centre of observa- 
tion. We must, therefore, foregoing the com- 



78 LITERARY ART. 

mon favor of the multitude, expect our rewards 
and approbation from artists themselves, whose 
work we interpret and whose path we make 
plainer and more secure for them. 

PAINTER. 

You assume too lofty a station, too austere 
manners. That is the vice of many who have 
failed to reach the popular ear. They will then 
write for the few, and they end, at last, with 
none.; their voice becomes silent, having noth- 
ing to reverberate against. Hearing is the 
half part of speaking, and we need an audience 
as much as we need the gift. They are for- 
tunate who early find one ; but probably they 
are the grandest souls who, unheard, still work 
on, never despairing of being listened to, 
either in this or the next age. Perhaps the 
best condition of any is that when we have no 
thought at all beyond what we are doing ; 
casting no longing glances among our con- 
temporaries, nor making our testament in 



LITERARY ART. 



79 



favor of posthumous heirs. Of this class the 
poets claim themselves to be, singing because 
they cannot help it, like the birds, according 
to their favorite comparison. 

At all times, in success or defeat, those em- 
ployed in any effort to which the public is a 
party need most of all, in order to preserve 
their integrity and powers undiminished, self- 
renunciation. This may seem to you incon- 
sistent with what I have said respecting the 
poet's and artist's craving of admiration. 

But who does not know the reaction which 
follows upon it ? He who does not has done 
nothing worthy of applause, nor will he long 
retain it. When all doing fails us we can fall 
back to being. I have heard that it was even 
better to have a poetic soul than to be a poet. 
I have known two or three such which made 
it seem likely to me that the ideal personages 
of poetry were true portraits. 

I, too, have a bit of philosophy, though no 
philosopher ; it is, that when the world is in- 



80 LITERARY ART. 

different to what we fancy we have to give it, 
we must believe that what we are in our es- 
sential nature, what we are without conscious 
effort, is of value to somebody. And if to a 
single soul, we ought to be grateful for exist- 
ence. If we fail in action, we can always have 
recourse to living, which is the true spring of 
all right intellectual effort. Was not that the 
real secret of Milton's force? No secret to 
him, but an act of his will ; a conscious pre- 
liminary to all his undertakings. He thought 
who would write poetry must himself be a 
true poem. We ought to make frequent offer- 
ings to opportunity ; the best one is steady 
preparation. Epaminondas lived forty years 
in obscurity ; at length an accident caused 
him to emerge. But it appeared, when 
fame brought into the light his previous his- 
tory, that he had always been sedulously pre- 
paring himself for great actions; whether for 
him to do, rested not with him. In the Union 
Army, when men were wanted to repair rail- 



LITERARY ART. 8 1 

roads and engines, and for any sort of me- 
chanical work, there stepped from the ranks 
an abundant number of them, masters of pre- 
cisely the trade required ; and the humblest 
employments found an opportunity to be con- 
spicuously and honorably exercised, not in 
some city alley or remote country village, but 
before the grateful eyes of a whole nation. 
Opportunity passes by the unprepared, and 
they wonder at their ill luck ; to many pre- 
pared it never comes ; like the reserves of an 
army, they are held back for an emergency or 
another day ; and, though eager for action, 
must be contented to assist without envy at 
the triumphs of their companions. It seems 
to me, therefore, that your attitude toward the 
public ought rather to be one of expectancy 
than of despair or unreliance. They may 
need you sooner than you anticipate. There 
may be those now standing aloof only forbid- 
den by an erroneous opinion of the severities 
of your studies, heightened by seeing the ob- 
6 



82 LITERARY ART. 

scurities, the bizarre terminology, and laby- 
rinthine construction of your philosophical par- 
lance. We who stand nearer, whose own 
work has necessarily evolved something of the 
same principles which you have disclosed, 
would gladly see you revealed to the world for 
its benefit and your own justification. 

But I will not insist, as in the begin- 
ning, upon all the graces of style in your phi- 
losophy, if you will compromise by clearness, 
neatness, and more illustration, an occasional 
figure, by way of bait for the more frivolous, 
and such a vocabulary as is common to the 
best English prose. For, after all, these are 
the foundations of literary art, which, I sup- 
pose, we all three agree, begins to be neces- 
sary only when one has a genuine message to 
deliver to his fellow men. 

POET. 

Yes; we have that in common certainly; 
although the event must generally determine 



LITERARY ART. 83 

the genuineness. I am puzzled sometimes to 
know whether style alone has not saved some 
pieces of literature ; so do not let us quite ex- 
clude that from the essential characteristic of 
the veritable message. You touch the point 
of the matter, however, when you name best 
English prose. For much of the speculative 
philosophy current among us has filtered down 
through the German, which, though a cognate 
dialect, has in its more abstruse investigations 
wandered far from the simplicity and direct- 
ness of its original tongue. It seems almost to 
have retrograded to the agglutinative forma- 
tions ; to have laid words together rather than 
fused them. When this undergoes translation 
into English, what can we expect ? And those 
who have studied philosophy in the German 
itself are compelled, when they pass over into 
English, to continue the nomenclature of the 
former, finding little in their own tongue to 
correspond; or to invent terms, simple and 
compound, that only the initiated can under- 



84 LITERAR Y AR T. 

stand. Thus is the very vestibule closed to 
many. 

Tell me, was it because the Germans went 
farther than man ever before had gone, and 
found all former modes of expression inade- 
quate ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Yes; something like that must have hap- 
pened. But we need not suppose it sprang up 
all at once. Modern philosophy was already 
conversant with the schoolmen and mystics, 
and borrowed some of its habits from them. 
The same charges have been levelled against 
it in all ages. Perhaps it amounts to this : 
that it is difficult to most, dealing in things 
they have the greatest unfamiliarity with, their 
own souls and minds, and, ignorant of these, 
they know not their signs, their mode of rep- 
resentation. Plato is dark enough to many. 
Sometimes he is so really; then again he is 
more luminous than man ever was. He seems 
sometimes to turn his face to his disciples, 



LITERARY ART. 



85 



then to the public. When to the former, he is 
hard to follow ; but when to the larger audi- 
ence, already well trained in all the arts and 
accomplishments that adorn mankind, sculp- 
ture, eloquence, gymnastics, and poetry, what 
form, what stateliness, what vivacity, imagina- 
tion, and thought are his ! 

PAINTER. 

Then indeed he is a Greek! In his more 
abstruse speculations he was trying to make 
philosophy walk like a geometrician. The 
method of Socrates' argument is formal and 
tiresome; the terms homely and familiar, which, 
in a manner, suggest and anticipate a particu- 
lar, practical, and useful deduction. However, 
where Plato is darkest is where he has bor- 
rowed from the Egyptian night. 

What may have been the original and most 
innate characteristic of the western mind, it is 
now too late to discover. Curiosity seems to 
me, through the times we can trace, the chief- 



86 LITERAR Y AR T. 

est, in comparison with the home-keeping, self- 
satisfied eastern mind. Its immense curiosity 
has overlaid and hidden its own dower with 
manifold alien and strange accretions. I am 
in doubt if philosophy be our own property. 
It has not the concordance and resemblances 
of a native product. It reminds me of the 
exotic trees in the gardens of wealthy citizens. 
They have larger, thicker leaves ; are more 
erect and less lithe, and seem to have come 
from a stiller air than ours, requiring less root, 
less toughness of fibre. There is much philos- 
ophy that appears to me not indigenous. As 
an artist, I always incline to consider form a 
criterion of original production, both in the 
individual and in nations. In the philosophy 
of the western world I see little to indicate a 
natural growth, since it seems unable to clothe 
itself from native resources. 

We have extended its applications rather 
than found new bases. Our adventurous 
spirit and acquisitiveness have explored this 



LITERARY ART. 



87 



as so many other antique passages. The 
Greeks had also an insatiable curiosity, and 
appropriated everything that took their fancy, 
whether a god or a philosophy. But by some 
magic it became at once beautiful and their 
own. There is an art in borrowing; it is to 
find the similar, the homogeneous. For a 
long time that temperament disappeared from 
the world, and men were contented to be 
imitators and copyists. Now, in these modern 
days, it has reappeared, and with redoubled 
intensity, so that it is difficult, indeed, to dis- 
cern what is our own and what is not. My 
friend, Matthew, who writes epigrammatic 
essays on lofty themes, and who knows the 
best in all literatures, says he is frequently 
startled, on delivering himself of a weighty 
sentence, with a dim sensation that he has 
somewhere seen the same before ; and he has 
to send it into the world, not quite sure 
whether it is his own or another's child. A 
witty classmate of mine declared of one of our 



88 LITER A R Y ART. 

professors who was too fond of supporting 
himself in his lectures by all that had been 
written on his subjects since the flood, that all 
that would be left of the good man at the final 
judgment and restitution would be a pair of 
quotation marks. I am astonished at the 
general intelligence, as it is called, of the 
times, and in our own country in particular. 

But, on examination, do you not think it 
would appear, in many instances, to be what 
one has heard that another knows? And is 
that not a very superficial kind of knowledge ? 
And how much of it is worth having? Or 
does it assume some new and more useful pur- 
pose at each adoption, changing, chameleon- 
like, its complexion, according to the needs 
and peculiarities of the possessor? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Knowledge traverses many hands, stays in 
few. You feel rich with plenty of money in 
your pocket, though it be not yours. Its mere 



LITERARY ART. 



8 9 



passage is the wealth of many, as the passage 
of knowledge is the education of most. Little 
of it remains a permanent possession. And as 
to much of it, I think it indifferent whether 
we or another have it in keeping. I am not 
anxious to know those things which others 
must know better than I, and gladly know 
for me. 

The grand secret of these times is to know 
how to use deputies. To know your own sub- 
ject well is the path to that secret. My neigh- 
bor reads his newspaper morning and evening, 
and likes to tell me the news. You know the 
theory and practice of colors, and you enjoy 
making me understand some general principles 
and noting the part they play in painting. 

Thus I obtain general intelligence, which is 
a sort of balance and adjuster in my special 
intelligence ; besides which, it establishes a 
vague but most necessary and comfortable 
bond among men. Curiosity, of which you 
spoke, is a very good guide, until we come 



90 



LITERARY ART. 



to subjects in which we find we have some 
natural power ; then we relinquish it, being 
now led by higher motives and impulses, 
either delight in the exercise of the gift itself, 
or the attainment of some good for ourselves 
or our fellows. But what do you think may 
be the cause of so much intellectual curiosity ? 

PAINTER. 

A kind of mental sensitiveness, almost as 
impressible and restless as that of the eye. 
You have observed those who absorb, like 
a sponge, whatever arrests their attention. 
Then there are those who are exclusively chil- 
dren of their own times ; who instinctively fol- 
low and show its tendencies, whatever they 
may be. They are like the lilies and sedges 
in this sluggish river ; we may not readily tell 
the course of its current, but they feel it in 
every fibre, and do not resist it, which is the 
point I was wishing to arrive at. If the ob- 
scurer portions of Greek philosophy came out 



LITERARY ART, 



91 



of Egypt, were perplexed by the Alexandrians, 
then involved in the mystical doctrines of 
Christianity, made more subtle by schoolmen, 
mystics, and controversialists, meeting mid- 
way the Arabian stream, and finally, in Ger- 
many, having all their difficulties intensified, 
how can you, with these obstructions, expect 
to reach the modern mind? Add, moreover, 
the style of your compositions, which certainly 
have not the art of the older. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Indirectly, as I have said, through a few 
who put into effect the things we teach ; and 
may we not hope to amend the form of our 
presentation ? 

PAINTER. 

When will you begin ? for are you not, in a 
measure, committed by what is already made 
public? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Perhaps we have made public what should 



9 2 



LITERARY ART. 



rather have been a private discipline. How- 
ever, we shall some day go back over our 
work, condensing and polishing and arranging 
in compact, precise form our miscellaneous 
excursions into the regions of speculation, 
hanging an ornament here and there for you 

and the poet. 

POET. 

" Striking the second heat," as Ben Jonson 

calls it. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

In no sort of composition can that well be 

omitted. 

POET. 

No ; not even by Shakespeare ; for it is of 
him that he says it. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Indeed ; I do not remember the place. But 
Ben Jonson must have known something of 
Shakespeare's literary habits. Was he not 
associated with him in theatrical business ? 



LITERARY ART. 



93 



POET. 
Yes ; it was Shakespeare who discovered 
the merits of one of his first plays, and offered 
to act one of its characters. Think of having 
Shakespeare admire you and bring you out ! 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But what is the remainder of the passage 

you quoted from? 

"poet. 

It is too long to repeat ; besides, I remem- 
ber only a line or two here and there. It con- 
tains enough, however, to let us know that 
Shakespeare did some honest work with file 
and square, and that not mere spontaneity 
supports the whole fabric of his genius. 

The lines I can recall now are no doubt 
more familiar to you than the fragment I just 
quoted. " Marlow's Mighty Line," the " Small 
Latin and less Greek," " Sweet Swan of 
Avon," are all from the same elegy as " strik- 
ing the second heat." So is that noble line : 
" He was not of an age, but for all time." 



94 LITERAR V ART. 

And then he says : 

" Nature herself was proud of his designs." 

* •£ -K * •£ 

" Yet must I not give nature all ; thy art, 
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. 
For though the poet's matter nature be, 
His art must give the fashion : and, that he 
Who casts to write a living line must sweat 
(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat 
Upon the muse's anvil ; turn the same 
And himself with it." 

I know only one more verse, in which he 
flies in the face of old-fashioned Horace, with: 

" For a good poet's made as well as born." 
PAINTER. 

That is what I have always believed. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Doubtless, since you seem to think there can 
be nothing which does not need the artistic 
intervention. 



LITERARY ART 



95 



POET. 
But the world never believes this about 
poets and poetry, though told a thousand 
times. You may try to make yourself an as- 
tronomer or a statesman and the world ap- 
proves, but do not try to be a poet. You may 
even claim some supernatural gift, and find 
yourself more easily accredited than if you 
avowed a purpose to be a poet. People per- 
sist in believing it is neither in man's will nor 
in the most ample education ; and they are 
skeptical of the miraculous gift they profess to 
believe in until the miracle is wrought. No 
one was ever advised to be a poet until he 
had become one ; thousands have been turned 
aside by a laugh or a sneer. The muse of poe- 
try offers no early protection to her children 
like the other muses. 

PAINTER. 

They require little, wrapped about in the 
warm garment of self-esteem. And besides, 



96 literar y ar r. 

do you not usually affirm poetry its own re- 
ward ? 



POET. 

If there were anciently better poets it was 
because there was less hindrance to their en- 
tering the field ; all were listened to, all were 
encouraged. By genius and industry some were 
at length successful ; others retired, but not 
with that disheartenment with which they re- 
treat who cannot even obtain a hearing. At 
present, one, if he must defer to public opinion, 
and all must in some degree, is scarcely able to 
discover what genuine response of welcome or 
rebuff is prepared for him. If he belong to a 
coterie, his merits are exaggerated at every 
birth-day breakfast table ; if he belong to none, 
he is as liable to undue depreciation or self- 
despair. So that a public is wanting on whom 
the poet may lean for encouragement or warn- 
ing. 



LITERARY ART. 



PAINTER. 



97 



Always the public ! substitute your art, lean 
upon that and you will be happy, which is a 
greater prize than success. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Well said ! and I would beg you always to 
remember the real nature of the matters about 
which you employ yourself, and the public in- 
terest in them. There are few who care enough 
for flowers to watch their growth, carefully 
nursing them, trimming what will impede, en- 
couraging what will make a handsome, shapely 
plant. But nearly all enjoy the result, the per- 
fect flower, the luscious fruit, praising it, and 
saying to the owner, " You always have such 
luck with your garden ! " 

PAINTER. 

I must remind you again that poetry and 
philosophy never take pains enough to con- 
ciliate the public. They turn their faces to 

7 



98 LITER A RY ART. 

it, but their feet go another way. And I am 
hopeless, while you assume such lofty airs, 
finding your consolation in the past, and your 
rewards in the future, of bringing you together 
with any useful result. 

POET. 

Have not all serious men of intellect found 
more comfort in the thought of the future than 
satisfaction in their present condition ? 

I can think of a dozen men of that character, 
who appealed themselves and their work to 
future generations ; ^Bschylus and, in recent 
times, Bacon. 

PAINTER, 

That is rather the fashion among a certain 
class of writers. Some of them, however, make 
larger bequests than their estates will pay. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

It is not to be wondered at that men disap- 



LITERARY ART. 



99 



pointed of expectation, finding their country- 
men antagonistic or more often indifferent, 
should look for hospitality elsewhere. I had 
forgotten that ^Eschylus placed his fame in 
the keeping of the future ; but it is a fact 
which the historians think strange, to me not 
at all so, that after forty triumphs and fifty 
failures in the exhibition of as many tragedies, 
he departed from Athens, and spent the last 
years of his life with the Sicilian king, Hiero. 
He who had fought at Marathon, had written 
Prometheus and Agamemnon, and given to the 
drama its most enduring features, at last found 
his beloved Athens inhospitable. The rewards 
which men of intellect covet are of such an 
immaterial kind that even the thought of them 
and of posthumous fame is often a consoling 
substitute for actual possession. 

PAINTER. 

I know of no such convenient article as im- 
mortality ; it is always at hand when the pres- 



100 LITERARY ART. 

ent does not suit us, or when it is so very 
sweet or glorious that we cannot conceive of 
any termination. Lovers pass over both situ- 
ations. They are blind enough to believe their 
bliss is so great it must be eternal, which, con- 
sidering how nature loves the mean and not 
the extreme, should be a reason for exactly 
the opposite belief. However, in due time, 
finding out their own weakness and punished 
by some revulsion of emotion, they journey 
like Plutarch and his wife to the oracles to 
consult how love may be preserved ; and end, 
as most of our faiths do, in postponement to 
some other existence. There is a representa- 
tive class in literature whose experience closely 
resembles that of passion : the ardent pursuit, 
the momentary possession, reaction, self-con- 
tempt, and an old age of pessimism. Worse 
than the loss of one's powers is the disbelief in 
them ; for it is usually attended by a contempt 
for the gifts and enthusiasm of others. One 
may be nothing himself, but when he begins 



LITERARY ART. I0 I 

to think all the world in the same plight, he 
cuts himself off from the escape and compen- 
sation for his nothingness. What becomes of 
all the young men of noble ideals and aspira- 
tions to take a step forward ? The world should 
be full of them by this time, in full-orbed pow- 
er, had they lived. They are not dead, but 
their enthusiasm died young. They ventured 
a few flights, became alarmed at the conse- 
quences, retreated to the shelter of pulpit, pro- 
fessorship, or newspaper, denied themselves, 
were successful, and are forgotten. 

But see how you are corrupting my man- 
ners ! Does not this sound like some kind of 
hybrid philosophy ? 

POET. 

You would do well to frequent the philos- 
ophers just enough to be able to philosophize 
on what is apparent ; the absolute science it- 
self is dangerous. It is a siren that sings only 
one song, but overpowering. He who hears 



1 02 LITER A RY ART. 

it cares little for what sounds as sweetly to 
others, poetry ; and prose that runs on more 
feet, but sometimes touches the earth as little. 

PAINTER. 

Yes ; even the prose of some philosophers. 
For your mention of Bacon a moment ago re- 
minds me that we ought to add his name to 
Plato's as a master of style in philosophical 
compositions. Bacon does not disdain at 
times those flights which we customarily think 
more appropriate to poetry. Perhaps we may 
guess at two causes of his ornateness: one, 
that he frequently practiced writing on pop- 
ular subjects ; and the other was a more un- 
conscious agency, the literary style of the 
times and his contemporaries. Good English 
was in the air, vivified by imagination, and 
robust by the practice of arms. What has 
become of its former copiousness and flex- 
ibility which upbore those ancient writers in 
their most daring sallies ? In its place we 



LITERARY ART. 



103 



have the sententious, the abrupt, the jerky, a 
mannerism rather than style ; or, effusive and 
vapid, like the crowd of writers who are ever 
most popular and soonest forgotten. Do you 
remember the Emperor Caligula's criticism on 
Seneca's writing? He said it was sand with- 
out lime. That is the best comparison ever 
made on the authors who write texts instead 
of a bond of stretchers and headers, whose 
startling and incoherent sentences have viti- 
ated our taste for completion in art. It is a 
manner that has been condemned by every 
age in which it was used — and at the same 
time more generally read than any other. I 
confess to a liking for it myself. One can 
carry one of its sentences about for a consider- 
able time, and pass for a profound thinker; 
and the best of it is, that they are so easy to 
imitate, and when you can make one or two 
your reputation is established. Americans 
much affect the epigrammatic ; the pound 
must be divided into its sixteen ounces, re- 



1 04 LITER A R Y ART. 

quiring no measuring at home. Then if the 

cake is a failure, neither servant nor mistress 

is to blame. Hereafter let us follow the good 

old kitchen rule of " a little of this and a little 

of that." 

Of these two mannerisms, the sententious and 

the effusive, the former flows like a full bottle 

with a gurgling, retardent motion ; the other 

like a waste-pipe, smooth, unremitting, and 

futile. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I suppose you are not to be silenced by the 
charge of inconsistency, and you would say 
you were misunderstood ; but are you not 
very near the reactionary spirit you accuse 
others of ? We must not censure our contem- 
poraries, by comparison with the ancients or 
ideal standards. Let us praise when we can, 
and at other times be silent. The bad judges 
itself ; let the critic busy himself with what is 
good. Besides, nothing is more hazardous 
than to determine the worth of literature at 



LITERARY ART. 



105 



the moment of its appearance to us ; we must 
turn ourselves many times to see it justly. 

PAINTER. 

That is as much as to say there are no uni- 
versally settled rules to judge by. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I am almost of that opinion ; or if there are, 
their application has become too difficult. 
Why is it that you and I seldom like the same 
books ? I fear that, according to the canons 
of criticism, I should have to give up several 
I am fond of. They seem to me, however, to 
excuse themselves for many violations of your 
rules. 

PAINTER. 

Rules there certainly are, and a literary art. 
But I agree the judges are not plentiful, and 
the artists who illustrate them are not always 
in favor. These impediments in a commercial 



1 06 LITERAR Y AR T. 

and scientific age are multiplied. Men per- 
suade themselves there are greater things. 
The drama has lowered the tastes of the more 
ignorant ; poetry and prose have lost their 
ancient calmness and grandeur, destroying 
the mental equipoise of the more intelligent 
classes. Sculpture is a lost art ; form, which 
was its inspiration, and which depended mainly 
upon familiarity with the nude, does not re- 
appear in literature, only the nude without 
the form. I wish you would persuade some 
one to write a Juvenalian satire on the nude in 
modern literature. I mean not the boldness 
or innocence of former times, but the naked- 
ness which pretends to hide itself, but wishes 
to be seen first. Were we used to the sight, 
the reading of it would be a comparatively 
harmless habit. Under the false notion that 
little is left to be original in, writers abandon 
themselves to every artifice, relaxing their hold 
on art. 



LITERARY ART. 



POET. 



107 



Do you not think readers and hearers share 
the same spirit ? 

PAINTER. 

I am always in doubt whether the press 
more leads, or merely represents public opin- 
ion and current tastes. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

It must be both. The impersonal character 
assumed in so much periodical writing leads 
us to the notion that some numerous and re- 
sponsible body utters itself, whereas it is only 
an individual. 

He who uses the first person much in writ- 
ing may have more conceit, but those who 
magnify it into we have most of impudence. 
Yet there is an immense class that simply 
echo each other. Put a pen into the hand of 
any particular member, and he reflects the sen- 
timents and tendencies of all the others. He 



1 08 LITER A RY ART. 

may justly write himself we. His only impor- 
tance is a collective one. The occasion may 
be temporary and casual and of no conse- 
quence. Again it is significant, and something 
permanent is added to literature. Others 
there are who represent few or none; but, be- 
cause some future time finds itself in accord 
with them, they become much honored, and 
are even considered the authentic voice of 
their own age. In literature there is a more 
subtle relation between producer and con- 
sumer than supply and demand. They are 
continually changing places. Now it is the 
want that brings forth the gratification, and 
again it is some productive power that creates 

the want. 

POET. 

I do not think there is a regular equilibrium 
between them, observing other kinds of pro- 
ductiveness. Substances do not change, nor 
are many new ones discovered. But see the 
infinite new varieties of forms invented for the 



LITERARY ART. 



IO9 



purposes of trade ; invented not to supply- 
some necessary, but rather to create an artifi- 
cial, want. As far as I can see, that is pre- 
cisely the characteristic of a large part of 
literature. Then, having created the appetite, 
they say truly there is a demand for their 
goods, and sophistically throw the responsi- 
bility upon the public. 

What has the public demanded of the mod- 
ern stage ? Little beyond an occasional 
novelty and effective acting. But the drama 
has expended its strength in its appointments 
and in the melodramatic situation, and has 
itself to blame for its degradation. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

There is some more reasonable explanation 
of the present dramatic fashions, I think. 

The late modern world, especially in cities, 
and as well in monarchies as republics, is 
essentially democratic. It cares little for its 
past or traditions, its gods or its heroes. It 



HO LITERARY ART. 

worships itself and its achievements. It 
wishes to see itself represented on the stage ; 
its civilization and manners, even its evils, are 
more interesting to it than the sufferings and 
crimes of its ancestors. Now, when you come 
to realism in any art, you come to all that is 
ignoble and fatal to art. And I call that the 
lowest form of realism which represents the 
actual present, whether on the stage or in a 
book. 

PAINTER. 

Whenever you reach our own times in your 
criticisms I find myself immediately parting 
company with you. The strictures I have 
made refer to the misuse of materials, more 
abundant in this than in any former age. I 
long to see the present adequately represented 
in every art ; all its variety, all that differences 
it from the past. You must admit it has a 
character of its own ; I want art to present 
and perpetuate that. 



LITERARY ART. m 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I have heard some of the claims that are 
made for our times, and also some of the ac- 
cusations. Those that refer to its material 
conquests and aspects I suppose you would 
not admit into your catalogue. Although a 
member of your guild, Couture thinks the 
steam-engine one of the finest subjects for 
the painter. What, then, would you allow to 
stand for its portrait ? 

PAINTER. 

Our progress in mechanical arts, our inven- 
tions, which we justly assert, place man a step 
higher in the creation than he has stood be- 
fore, cannot be omitted from any faithful por- 
traiture of the modern world. These achieve- 
ments have given him a more exalted opinion 
of himself, as you have already said ; they 
impress him, not as of old, that he is de- 
scended by a longer or shorter line from gods 
and demigods, but that he is himself his own 



1 1 2 LITER A R Y ART. 

god. His sudden and recent knowledge and 
control over almost the whole of the natural 
world have made him something of a material- 
ist. He believes in forces, and in their corre- 
lation and interplay he sees a harmony which 
he momentarily substitutes for Providence. 
But the spiritual has not yet readjusted itself 
to the modern physical discoveries. This con- 
flict and transition we ought to represent artis- 
tically in a Promethean manner, not in those 
narrow, subjective ways that give to the world 
only personal records of the struggle now at 
its fiercest. It awaits its grand generalization ; 
that alone would calm the opposing elements. 
Might it not be figured as a contest between 
new and old divinities ? For have not our 
discoveries in nature, experiments in life and 
government, given to mankind again the same 
gifts which Prometheus once brought — hope 
and the means to elevate itself above animal 
life? 



LITERARY ART. 



113 



POET. 
Your plan is admirable. It would require, 
however, some kind of symbol for most effec- 
tive representation. Our religion is not yet 
mythology, though it may be far on the road. 
Still it would be offensive to many to portray 
the struggle, even remotely, as one in any way 
connected with religion. No ; we must not 
agitate men's minds, when we seek to please 
or instruct them, with suspicion of secret, sub- 
versive designs. Art must familiarize men 
with interpretations of their own beliefs ; they 
v/ill then have an opportunity of observing 
what is false, imperfect, unreasonable, or true 
and beautiful in those beliefs. Their own no- 
tions are always indistinct ; it is the business of 
the artist to set them in bold relief. Then the 
human mind, ever inclined to truth and beau- 
ty, will slowly and silently reject whatever is 
distasteful to its intuitive sense, and recover 
and treasure what is agreeable. In any other 
way than this I do not think the literary or 



1 14 LITERAR Y ART. 

other artist need concern himself in the ref- 
ormation of the manners or ideas of the 
world. 

Consider how the conception of the devil 
has been transformed by being taken up into 
literature as an actor, without moral intention. 
It was long before Milton's characterization of 
him began to be noted. Readers read out, at 
first, what they were in the habit of believing, 
a pure evil essence. It was a great step in the 
extirpation of the popular conception when 
a certain grand air was impressed upon his 
wicked image. Though always known as a 
fallen angel, in the course of the centuries he 
had become horrible and grotesque, assuming 
a myriad miserable shapes. Milton restored 
him to his original semi-divine state. In do- 
ing that he undermined his place and office in 
the prevalent theology. What Milton began, 
Burns and Goethe finished. Mephistopheles 
is a perfectly human devil whom we, who must 
have a devil, can still retain our faith in. I 



LITERARY ART. 



115 



will not venture to say what has been done for 
his supposed most ancient enemy, and how 
much remains to do. Let us still hide our- 
selves behind the images of the gods. When 
we would overthrow them it is only necessary 
to represent them according to current beliefs ; 
when we would sustain, according to our own 
ideals. 

PAINTER. 

Literary art ought indeed to study the best 
fashion of dressing out its inventions, and giv- 
ing the most faithful picture of what actually 
exists, leaving the ethical corollary to a slower 

discovery. 

POET. 

Is it not curious to observe that the modern 
school of realists depict in manners and in 
morals mainly the vicious, the sordid, and the 
weak? 

PAINTER. 

Not at all ; look at that nest in the bush ; 
it is not all down and softness ; there is a great 



Il6 LITERARY ART. 

deal of coarse work in it, sticks, straws, and 
mud. 

POET. 

Yes ; but on the outside, almost before it has 
begun to be a nest. 

PAINTER. 
On the contrary, that is the most interesting 
part of the structure ; it is the architecture ; 
the rest is upholstery. 

POET. 

But you would not call the bad, the disa- 
greeable, the foundation of any muse's temple? 

PAINTER. 

You evade the point ; I call it neither good 
nor bad. I mean that it is interesting; and 
we cannot spare it because it happens to offend 
idealists and optimists. 

POET. 

But you leave it without recovery or expla- 
nation. 



LITERAR Y ART. ny 

PAINTER. 

I do not comprehend you. 

POET. 

Have you not felt that everything evil 
stood in need of explanation, and that the 
good never does ? 

PAINTER. 

Oh yes ! that feeling is one of the deepest 
and most universal in the soul. That gives to 
us the arena for the interaction of the good 
and bad; and the most exciting moment is 
when they are brought in contact. 

POET. 

But it seems to me the writers we just now 
spoke of, as well as many others, expend all 
their force and art in elaborating the shadow 
side of humanity. 

PAINTER. 

Undoubtedly; for, as I have already said, 
that must be interesting to an age that has 



H8 LITERARY ART. 

determined to turn its eye upon itself; and 
hopes by the accurate realism of its portrait 
to substitute science for fancy, self-knowledge 
for erudition. 

Thence may come many an improvement in 
the social, moral, and political condition of 
mankind, which all the reveries of the imagina- 
tion and the speculations of philosophy never 
would have accomplished. The reporters and 
novelists, and, of late, a few poets penetrate 
the purlieus of cities in search of startling 
and fresh materials ; they are soon followed 
by the philanthropists. Justice rarely enters 
them ; but when she does, it is to punish, not 
to ameliorate. 

The virtues and graces do not require such 
investigation ; they record themselves, are easy 
of access ; and all in that kind was painted, 
beyond our power to improve, long since. On 
the other hand, it is because evil constantly 
takes on new appearances and offers such a 
continuous problem, that it is such a fertile 



LITERARY ART. 



II 9 



field for all those who design to employ them- 
selves in ministering to the literary wants of 
the time. All that belongs to this problem in 
a given case may be successfully embodied in 
artistic form ; but it renews itself from genera- 
tion to generation, and almost in each indi- 
vidual. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

When the method you describe is used as 
the foil of what is fine and noble, I should be 
willing to admit its claim to be artistic. But 
when it ends in itself, I cannot see use or 
beauty in it. • It appears to me to be doing 
the work of a scavenger with bag and hook. 

PAINTER. 

I suppose you want some tiresome moral 
inserted. There are those who require that 
sauce with every dish. I maintain that a con- 
scious moral purpose is an actual impediment 
to the artistic faculty. 



1 20 LITERAR Y AR T. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

It need not be conscious, but it must exist, 
else its work will be a failure. Perhaps we 
ought not to use the word moral in that con- 
nection in the common sense ; and if we could 
find the right term no doubt we should agree 
in idea. 

But we stand in need of a word, something 
less than moral and more than sesthetical, that 
shall combine in nearly equal parts the per- 
ception by sensation, or that which gives pleas- 
ure or pain, in works of art, and that percep- 
tion which determines whether we have a 
right to be pleased or pained ; in short, wheth- 
er it be true or false art. Do you know, or 
could you invent such a word? 

PAINTER. 

It would be asking too much of our lan- 
guage, which has not yet become polished and 
subtle for such fine distinctions. It has lived 
so long by borrowing, it scarcely knows how 



LITERARY ART. 121 

to employ its own capacities. But did you 
ever think how young our language yet is, four 
or five centuries at most ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Yes ; it is young, and, on that very account, 
supple, adaptive, and happily untrammeled 
by inexorable usages. It does not have to 
consult its grammar to see what it can borrow 
fittingly. 

But, since you think we are at present with- 
out the exact word which should be, as it 
were, the child of moral and aesthetical, a 
resemblance made up of likeness and unlike- 
ness, do you accept my explanation of that 
spirit which should direct the efforts of those 
who use any art as a means of communicating 
themselves to their fellow-men ? 

PAINTER. 

I find we almost always agree when we stop 
to define exactly the words and phrases we 
happen to be using. 



1 22 LITERAR Y ART. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Ought not, then, those who are engaged in 

literary pursuits to be very careful to throw 

into their work, not only that which shall 

please, but which, on examination, shall be 

found to have a right to please ? Is there not 

a principle of that kind at the basis of true 

literary art? 

PAINTER. 

I think there may be ; and you seem to be 
on much more reasonable ground than when 
you doubted whether there were any fixed 
lights for our guidance in literature ; and were 
ready to let your own idiosyncrasy determine 
for you the value of any book. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Sometimes, confused by specious statements, 
we are driven to take refuge in our own nar- 
row, personal experience ; and we must re- 
cover ourselves by taking a fresh start from 
some new generalization. 



LITERARY ART. 



123 



It is true I have found in certain obscure 
authors things wonderfully helpful at the mo- 
ment ; yet I will not pretend they deserve 
universal fame. 

POET. 

The celebrity of a number of books has been 
obtained in that way. The reader, not the 
writer of them, has made them temporarily 
fashionable. There was a time when all the 
young poets read Burton, because our Lord 
Byron did. I have noticed that men who are 
authors themselves have often whimsical tastes 
in reading; besides the common favorites, 
they have others less known, into which they 
seem to read more than anybody else can find. 
We are imitators of the great, even of their 
foibles. We want to read the same books, 
hoping to think the same thoughts and pick 
up the secret of their genius. And so you 
find the contemporaries and admirers of the 
great reading, if they can, in the same direc- 
tion with them ; and along wdth the best 



124 



LITERARY ART. 



literature some inferior is often elevated in 
consequence into brief honor. 

There are many other works that owe their 
renown to the praises of those who read little 
and only in one course. Yet every one thinks 
himself competent to pass judgment on books. 
Having forgotten or rejected the ancient 
canons of criticism, we have scarcely substi- 
tuted better. Many, indeed, believe there can 
be none, and are half persuaded that what 
pleases them needs no further support or 
reason. Various dogmas and proverbs in 
vogue reveal the tendency to independent 
judgment " rather than reference to criteria 
acknowledged by all. We are warned to ac- 
cept the popular verdict. In short, it is the 
democratic spirit, of which we have spoken, 
entering the intellectual sphere, annulling the 
past and compromising in the most arrogant 
manner with authority. A few names still 
hold it in check. The triumphant publisher 
says to the critic, " Well, the book sells. Is 



LITERARY ART. 



125 



that not conclusive proof that your estimate is 
a mistake ? " The managers of the metropoli- 
tan newspapers ask no more of their writers 
than that their articles shall get themselves 
read ; if copied and opposed, so much the 
better. 

PAINTER. 

Where then shall we look for an audience 
if we disdain the public ? 

POET. 
We must accustom ourselves to expect none 
in the present ; or two or three ought to con- 
tent us. It is better even to be silent than to 
pander to the public taste. 

PAINTER. 

What motives then shall we permit to lead 
us into the cultivation of any art ? 

POET. 

As for motives, irresistible convictions an- 



1 26 LITER A R Y AR T. 

swer for some writers; there are always 
those who are not happy without a following, 
a party, a sect, a coterie ; set down, too, the 
mercenary motive, and the love of approba- 
tion, by no means to be scorned, but liable to 
satiety or excess. I honor greatly, and for- 
give the absence of art, in that class of book- 
makers whose life has been full of adventure ; 
who have seen and been a part of many 
things ; and who, without special motive, ex- 
cept it may be an overflowing information and 
experience, desire to leave a record of their 
lives. The relations of the early adventurers 
into America are our best literature, if it may 
be called our own. Exploration and cam- 
paigning are a good education for a writer; 
not sitting in a corner meditating, and learn- 
ing the world at second-hand, nor making a 
few square miles of meadow and mountain the 
image of the universe. A man needs to have 
been in peril, to have suffered, to have eaten 
his bread in tears, to have been an eye-witness 



LITERARY ART. 



127 



of great actions, to have shared the emotions 
of triumph or defeat, in order to know what 
life is, and if he would portray it, to do so 
with simplicity and strength. Have you ever 
considered how many great writers have been 
soldiers? common soldiers too, and some of 
highest rank. Almost all the ancient : ^Eschy- 
lus was a famous soldier ere writer ; Sopho- 
cles in many battles shared the command of 
the Athenian army with Pericles ; Xenophon 
was the most skilful of Greek soldiers ; David 
among the Hebrews, Caesar among Romans. 
Among ourselves a whole line of authors have 
been soldiers : Chaucer, Sidney, and Landor 
was the last. An activity in which we are 
not merely interested as spectators, but facing 
danger and sharing in exciting ideas and 
events, kindles the intellect and supplies the 
materials for its exercise. Peace is good for 
shop-keepers, but the air is too heavy and 
slumberous for us. Although liable to your 
ridicule I must speak of that class who profess 
9 



128 LITERAR Y ART. 

to have no motive, but rather an impulse to 
communicate themselves ; who enjoy most the 
doing the thing, rather than the results. 

PAINTER. 

That might happen once or twice in mod- 
esty and unconsciousness; but, supposing it 
should be a writer whom the world found out 
and very much applauded, do you think he 
would ever be able to write again under the 
same conditions as at first? 



POET. 



It is probable that something would come 
between him and his work : a slight shadow of 
unrest, of expectation, or hope, or fear. 



PAINTER. 

Call it rather a light, a sensible and positive 
guide to some larger world of consciousness, 



LITERARY ART. 



129 



productive of wider insight and added power. 
For when the mind has established relations 
and sympathy with other minds, it is wonder- 
fully helped, and now becomes possessed of a 
new kind of consciousness, less limited and in- 
dividual than that of which you spoke. It in- 
voluntarily partakes of the universal. The 
writer must find, by throwing out lines from 
himself, where he can connect and increase 
himself. Until we do come out of ourselves 
and give others a place and recognition, we 
shall only be able to do things of promise, not 
the perfect and representative work. 

POET. 

Yet remember that many masterpieces of 
literature were a first and often a last attempt. 
The writers, if they tried again, were too 
plainly conscious, only repeating themselves, 
and showing the precious gem was a solitary, 
not a mine. 



130 



LITERARY ART. 



PAINTER. 



Those are plants of a single flower. But 
when a man has found by some chance, or sim- 
ply in the exercise of an inward impulse that 
he is the happy owner of an intellectual gift, 
in which others as well as himself may take 
delight, then comes the most critical moment 
of his career. Fatal then is rest — rest in an 
honor won, a work well done. Fatal too is 
repetition. How often and painfully must we 
reinvigorate our admiration of many writers 
by a recurrence to some former or early per- 
formance. We enjoy the promise, lament the 
untoward season or the poorly nurtured root. 

POET. 

How then shall we seize this critical moment 
and give fulfilment to its promise ? 

PAINTER. 

Much may be done ; something trusted to 
the destiny which is commonly exactly pre- 



LITERARY ART, 



13* 



pared in every endeavor. We can do at any 
rate as the husbandman and the good gen- 
eral do — leave as little as possible to chance, 
and learn and experiment in the art we have 

chosen. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

It is difficult for me to follow you two when 
you have the conversation to yourselves. You 
begin well, and provoke each other to fine 
speeches ; but seldom do you come to a con- 
clusion, or to that point for which you set out. 
As I cannot well follow your flights, I will 
keep a plainer path. Still you give the direc- 
tion. Nothing is more difficult than for phil- 
osophy to follow its own course ; it is asked 
so many irrelevant questions which it thinks it 
ought and tries to answer. So, led by you 
when you touched, but immediately almost 
forgot, the issue contained in the achievement 
of a certain amount of success, I endeavored 
to hold my mind there, and to follow the trail 
rather than you. And it appeared to me that 



132 



LITERARY ART, 



there was justly the field for the exercise of 
the literary art which you both, and I myself, 
are convinced is so important to those who use 
literature for the benefit of others, and their 
own pleasure and self-development. Let us 
cherish as a fine sentiment the idea of the first 
discovery of some mental power whose earliest 
exercise is a sort of pastime rather than serious 
endeavor ; and which by chance may prove to 
be, as you say, a masterpiece. That is the 
moment for the most sedulous industry and 
inward energy. What has been an occasional 
and idle effort should be pursued as an art; 
consciously studying all the hidden and appar- 
ent causes of our own success or another's ; 
leaving to chance only so much as the public 
mind, not ours, must be responsible for. For 
as the weather is to the farmer and the sailor, 
or the unexpected numbers or movement of 
an enemy to a general, so is popular opinion 
to the writer. It is incalculable, but our own 
part is an exact and certain measure. There 



LITERARY ART. 



133 



is a great deal of applause and censure in the 
wrong place ; but indiscriminate praise is worse ; 
it hurts by blinding the object of it to his own 
strength or weakness, and it throws the more 
careful observer into excessive antagonism. 
Lately I heard a good poet, but not a great 
one, so universally extolled for all sorts of ex- 
cellencies, that I quite forgot the pleasure I had 
formerly received from him, and was ready to 
concede no merit whatever to his work. But 
I am aware we must put away such moods, 
and not add one injustice to another. 

PAINTER. 

What attitude then should we take toward 
the public? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

One that perceives, knows, is silent, while it 
prepares a remedy in more perfect work ; one 
that is not blind to its own faults, and is not 
secretly glad because the public is blind. In- 
stead of criticising particulars, let us elaborate 



134 



LITERARY ART. 



the principles and illustrate by example all that 
belongs to literary art. If people praise what 
is inferior, either in construction or sentiment, 
we know it characterizes their intellectual con- 
dition and habits. We know then what labor 
is before us, and have to equip ourselves for it. 

POET. 
That is what I should like to know. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

It is indeed a hard matter to find out, and 
one in which we must mainly rely upon our- 
selves. Have you ever written anything that 
was a success ? 

PAINTER. 

Oh, yes ; he has the honor of having a sin- 
gle poem in the school-books ; it first went the 
rounds of all the newspapers, and one of them 
was bold enough to say a new poet had ap- 
peared. 



LITERARY ART. 



135 



PHILOSOPHER. 

Is that the source and test of school-reader 
selections? 

PAINTER. 

Yes, mainly; occasionally, however, they 
venture to insert something of real literary 
merit. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Never mind his innuendo. But what pur- 
pose have the compilers ? 

PAINTER. 

Apparently not to cultivate a taste for good 
literature, but to find what is best adapted to 
teach the art of reading well. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Then the best writing does not require the 
best reading ? 

PAINTER. 

It would seem so. But we ought to allow 



I3 6 LITERARY ART. 

that understanding should go before elocu- 
tion ; and the selections are leveled to the 
average youthful intelligence. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Would it not be better, then, to cultivate 
the intelligence first, and that by the means of 
reading and expounding the authors of highest 
rank in thought and style ? 

PAINTER. 

Yes ; I think so. But that would require a 
teacher of another kind than the usual, as well 
as reading-book. The text-books must be 
adapted to those who are to hear the lesson, 
no less than to those who are to learn it. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But would not the pupil who understood 
what he was reading be able to render it well 
enough ? 



LITERARY ART. 



PAINTER. 



137 



Not always ; but I think there should be a 
separation in the teaching, lest, while the 
pupil is drilled in the elements, voice, expres- 
sion, pronunciation, etc., on the page before 
him, he may not lose sight of the writing itself, 
or perhaps become tired and disgusted at it. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But what w T as the selection made from the 
poet's works ? 

PAINTER. 

It was something in the pathetic manner ; 
that always reaches the popular modern heart. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

And it was successful ? Was copied and 
parodied ? 

PAINTER. 

Parodied ! You have hit it exactly ! I 
meant to have mentioned it myself. For that 



1 3 8 LITERAR Y AR T. 

is the crowning triumph of the modern short 
poem. 

POET. 

How you spoil the satisfaction of my one 
small success, the cause of which I never could 
discover ; for I never valued the poem in com- 
parison with others I have written. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I am disappointed. You said you would like 
to know how to equip yourself to improve the 
public taste in literature ; and, though I con- 
fessed the means were not very clear to me, 
I expected some light from you who have 
already gained a hearing, and who follow none 
but the highest ideals. It seems to me if I 
could only get secure hold of an audience all 
the rest would be easy. Then I could both 
teach and learn. I thought your success 
might give us some clue to this mutual rela- 
tion, and how it was to be managed and what 
it required. 



LITERARY ART. 



139 



POET. 

I can assure you success teaches one very 
little, a very little more than failure ; more 
often it is a dangerous temptation to over- 
production. Success rather astonishes than 
teaches anything. One likes the sensation 
and is eager to repeat it, but I am not sure he 
knows much better how than at first. Each 
effort is a different device, converging uncon- 
sciously into old tracks; and therein, I sup- 
pose, consists the fact of repeated successes. 
Writer and reader become accustomed to each 
other; and a certain pathway is opened be- 
tween them, easier and easier to traverse up 
to a certain point. In some cases the path- 
way becomes an intellectual highway for man- 
kind. In others, finding it really leads no- 
where, and has no great variety of prospect, 
it is abandoned. I read authors who live 
upon an idea as upon a settled income. They 
tear down and build over their houses and put 
back the larger part of the old furniture, which 



140 



LITERARY ART. 



sometimes you recognize with delight ; at 
other times you feel imposed upon. Instead 
of so many autobiographies, I should prefer a 
few memorials, by celebrated authors, on their 
own works. At some future time I intend to 
select such remarks as I can find of that char- 
acter, scattered through literature, adding 
thereto some comments and additions of my 
own. I should like your impressions of such 
an undertaking ; for it would contain much 
that is new, doubtful, and that would be likely 
to meet with opposition. Both the successful 
and the unsuccessful would have much to an- 
swer, inasmuch as I should strive to make the 
empirical wholly disappear into a clear and 
uniform principle. You can imagine how diffi- 
cult this must be, since authors' experiences 
are so peculiar and apparently so contradic- 
tory. 

An author's relation to the public is a diffi- 
cult matter for him to manage. He slowly - 
understands or mistakes it through the public 



LITERARY ART 



141 



reception of his offerings. He knows what 
the popular taste is ; that is no longer in 
doubt, if statistics can be relied upon. He 
knows that the best books are subject to acci- 
dent, now read, and again forgotten. 

Yet, it is not at all certain that an author is 
flattered in finding what part of his work has 
most pleased his contemporaries. 

If his purpose is clear, his energy calm and 
always full, his command of himself and 
knowledge of the world complete, he may be 
able to do what his own time likes to amuse 
itself with, while he reserves prudently his 
own opinion of his effort, and leads the public 
smoothly and unconsciously toward the work 
of higher import, which shall finally command 
their notice and justify his career. 

Whoever pursues another course, and, in 
the beginning, challenges and upsets all that 
has a fixed place, proposing to reverse every 
method and law, will win, with immediate at- 
tention, immediate resistance ; and, entering 



142 



LITERARY ART. 



the arena as a soldier, will never be permitted 
to lay aside his arms. It is so difficult to 
separate ourselves from the tendencies of our 
own age and country that it requires some 
violence to achieve a position of contact and 
observation at once. And what is the result? 
Loneliness and isolation. Who can keep the 
true perspective in contemplating the superior, 
and in mingling with the inferior, deities ! 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But does not success often show how little 
literary art is concerned in its achievement? 
Are not many compositions prepared with ex- 
treme care and attention to the canons of art, 
and having every quality which one can think 
of as requisite to ensure a welcome reception, 
yet which fail to impress the world at all ? 

PAINTER. 

There is no doubt of the fact ; but the ques- 
tion is, ought it to be so ? and is the obstacle 



LITERARY ART. 



143 



in the writing itself or in a public incompe- 
tent to form correct opinions ? Usually those 
pieces of literature it at once seizes upon and 
adopts are very short-lived, which seems to in- 
validate its competency. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But what shall we say of those works that, 
with the utmost simplicity and either having 
no art at all or perhaps violating all its prin- 
ciples, still catch and continue to hold for gen- 
erations the ear of men ? I think we shall have 
to agree that such facts and others we have 
gone over prove the impossibility of making 
literary art an exact science. Its nature seems 
to be to follow on after literature, explaining 
and philosophizing its creations, rather than 
preceding them, and giving formulas and re- 
cipes for successful experiment. 

PAINTER. 
From all that has been done in arts and 



144 LITERAR Y ART. 

sciences, and especially in the imitative arts, 
there can be deduced general principles which 
may be guides in future attempts. But I ad- 
mit there is a personal equation entering into 
every production which renders it difficult to 
discover those principles in operation. As to 
those works of great fame which you think are 
without artistic qualities, or discordant with 
them, I believe they are such admirable copies 
of nature as to conceal the means of their ef- 
fectiveness. In these, as in nature, you see re- 
sults, and not causative forces. As Sir Philip 
Sidney says, " They are done according to art 
though not by art ; while others use art to 
show art." They who are the first observers of 
fine human actions and the suggestions of na- 
ture and feel an inward impulse to represent 
them, are the originators of what we then 
name art. We may imitate their method, but 
they will have no power unless we too have 
original insight. I must still, however, hold 
firmly to the belief that certain essential rules 



LITERAR Y ART. 145 

exist independently of the particular embodi- 
ment, and must be studied and strictly ob- 
served by him who writes. If then he has any 
original power, he is prepared to use it to the 

best advantage. 

POET. 

What is this original power, genius, insight, 
which you repeat so often? 

PAINTER. 

It is not an easy matter to define them. 
They ever take some new form. We know 
them when we see them, but cannot very well 
describe them beforehand. Some say they 
are a larger receptivity ; observing ten things 
where others observe one, and, by means of 
ideals in the mind, setting them in feigned rela- 
tions which become symbols of truth and na- 
ture. Sometimes, on the contrary, they are a 
more concentrative vision, seeing not the ten 
things, but the one, with such intensity that it 
is resolved into all and stands for all. And 



I46 LITERAR Y AR T. 

well it may, for there is nothing which is not 
related and representative. There is a vision 
which can take in the complex and deliver the 
simple, which can measure variety and detect 
unity. 

POET. 

And what would be the rules you speak of 
for the guidance of one who possessed any of 
these gifts ? 

FAINTER. 

Almost all great writers of ancient and mod- 
ern times have contributed some one or more 
laws of literary art. Unfortunately they have 
never been collected into a body, and we are 
sent to grammar and rhetoric books for in- 
struction and authority. But a familiar ac- 
quaintance with the best writers will furnish 
us enough of both precept and examples. 
Goethe, among moderns, has left the larger 
number of maxims and the best, and he is 
continually letting us into the secrets of his 



LITERARY ART, 



H7 



own methods. Never was literary machinery 
so fully exposed before, and so instructively, 
and with no loss of dignity. We not only see 
the tools and their various uses, and how to 
manipulate them, but we are not forbidden to 
examine the raw material, lest in the finished 
fabric we should remember too vividly the or- 
dinary and earthly originals. Most common- 
ly, authors burn their bridges behind them, 
and we are ignorant of the genesis and sug- 
gestion of their work. Not so with Goethe; 
and therefore he is a good master for those 
who seek one. So is Milton, though some- 
times too pedantic, which he more seldom 
shows in practice. But he is an example of 
how much genius may be fortified by learning, 
and how much among adverse circumstances 
it may accomplish by a resolute will. Landor 
is a good master for all minor ornaments ; he 
can almost teach style, and quite harmony, 
amplitude, and finish. Puttenham, Sidney, 
Ben Jonson are all fit to teach Englishmen to 



I48 LITERAR Y ART, 

utter English thought. We have never will- 
ingly taken lessons from our Keltic country- 
men since we conquered them ; though we 
draw furtively from their fountains the whole 
of our imaginative literature. The Saxon 
Englishman is and ever has been without gay- 
ety, without imagination. His natural apti- 
tude is for morals and politics and trade. 
Among the Kelts, however, the Welsh alone re- 
duced their literary fashions and practices to 
formal rules ; and though slightly metaphysical 
they far surpass Aristotle or Horace. They 
contain all the ancient and anticipate most of 
the latest notions in regard to literary art. 

Hear this one, which I think I can repeat : 
" There are three qualifications for poetry : en- 
dowment of genius, judgment from experi- 
ence, and happiness of mind." Endowment of 
judgment was further defined as founded upon 
" bold design, frequent practice, and frequent 
mistakes." 

The triad of thought was : " Perspicuity, 



LITERARY ART. 



I49 



amplitude, and justness ; " and the three foun- 
dations of learning had none of our restricted 
limits, but made learning almost synonymous 
with life ; they were " seeing much, suffering 
much, and studying much." 

You know well what I think the French can 
do for us. I should like to take an equal 
measure of their vivacity and refined, licentious 
wit, and our pathos and coarseness, mingle 
them well and redistribute them. 

POET. 

Do you think there would be anything left 
to our portion to move to tears or laughter? 

PAINTER. 

I beg of you to leave tears and laughter as 
figures of speech. The emotions to be pro- 
duced by the most powerful writing should be 
deeper than tears, less light and more insin- 
uating than laughter. 



i5o 



LITERARY ART. 



POET. 



Where then can you find an example of true 
pathos? 

PAINTER. 

The false is so common and popular that the 
true passes for something else, and there is a 
confusion as to what it is. The false plays 
upon the more morbid nerves until we start 
and cry at the least touch. The true is a ten- 
der and solemn sentiment to be employed 
delicately and infrequently. Have you read 
the " Exequies of Mignon ? " 

POET. ■ 
Yes, a hundred times ; and it makes plain 
your distinctions. 

PAINTER. 

It is the best example I know of the true 

pathetic. 

POET. 

Since you are giving examples and rules of 
literary art, I should like to know what you 



LITERARY ART. 



151 



consider a good model of the art of story- 
telling. 

PAINTER. 

Probably you will think me extremely old- 
fashioned, and taking refuge in the past from 
which I have warned you so much, but the 
best story was almost the first : the story of 
Joseph and his Brethren. What ingenuity 
throughout, what natural scenery, simple but 
effective detail ! What naivete in the incident 
of the colored coat and the surreptitious cup ! 
What delicate but irresistible pathos in Jo- 
seph's interview with his brothers, where he 
refrains himself, and goes into his chamber and 
weeps ! How dramatically managed is every 
situation, however trivial ! If you like, as I 
do, an occasional fillip in a narration, there is 
Potiphar's wife, the light woman of the piece, 
and the usual episode of illicit love, which 
reads strangely modern. So much, at least, 
of the model has been imitated ; but little of 
its simplicity and tender pathos. 



152 



LITERARY ART. 



POET. 



You were speaking of the pathetic when I 
interrupted you ; will you continue? 

PAINTER. 

How much and in what ways the human 
race has suffered in two thousand years, and 
how its own views of its sufferings have be- 
come deepened and so interesting to itself is 
curiously displayed by a comparison of ancient 
with modern specimens of pathos. Does it not 
puzzle you to know why the much talked of 
pathos of Euripides was so moving to the 
Athenians and Syracusans ? 

POET. 

It has little likeness to ours. But perhaps 
as the Greeks were gayer and more easily 
pleased than the moderns, so it required less 
to awaken tender sentiments. However, this 
amounts to the same as your view : we have 
suffered so much more through a length of 



LITERARY ART, 



iS3 



years we demand a more violent attack upon 
our emotions to bring forth a response. The 
Greeks had measure in everything and pro- 
priety ; whether their minds were unagitated 
by the complexities that overwhelm us, or be- 
cause they had attained to repose through the 
perfection of their arts of architecture and 
sculpture and literature, I know not. 

PAINTER. 

Most that was painful, tragic, pathetic, they 
placed back among their gods and heroes, and 
it was softened by memory, elevated by the 
sublimity of the actions, and the majesty of 
the actors. There was no room for tears ; pity 
there was, mingled with pride and reverence for 
destiny. Sophocles was a great critic as well 
as a great general and dramatist. He said 
^Eschylus did right without knowing it. He 
said of himself that he was wont to describe 
men as they should be ; but that Euripides de- 
scribed them as they are. Now I suppose that 



154 



LITERARY ART. 



Euripides' realism was the source of his pathos 
and power over his audience. He alone, among 
mortals, has fairly succeeded in elevating com- 
monplace to sublimity. We have no mythol- 
ogy with which to symbolize nature and human 
life ; nor are any of the arts confined, at pres- 
ent, as to their subjects, within the narrow but 
universally known limits of the ancient. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Do you think the absence, or freedom from, 
those ancient limitations favorable to us? 

PAINTER. 

What have taken their place would be a 
more proper question; since without some 
background of belief, of antiquity or destiny, 
how can art flourish ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I am glad to see we are coming to an agree- 
ment, at least about the present time. 



LITERARY ART, 



POET. 



155 



Will you allow me to answer the question of 
what has taken the place of the old lines by 
which men's inventions were protected and 
guided ? immeasurable caprice. The days of 
art are over. Philistines possess the world 
more and more. A crowd, with average intel- 
ligence and commonplace sentiments, has 
subsidized the public mind, and closed it to 
the approach of everything serene, noble, 
ideal. It is impatient of all that cannot 
deluge it with tears or shake it with laughter. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

But the past is as much ours as it ever was 
that of any age. Why can we not work in 
that field still ? 

POET. 

Yes ; we may if we can get any one to listen 
to us. The real worth of the ancient classical 
subjects, or the poverty of modern life, is 



1 5 6 LITERAR Y AR T. 

shown by the fact that the best works in litera- 
ture and art are still founded upon them. I 
believe they will never go entirely out of 
fashion, though they may disappear in the 
interregnum of commerce, materialism, and 
literary mediocrity. When the doctrine that 
life, is more than literature, propounded even 
by novelists, turned critics, is in vogue, 
what can we expect ? Does it not show that 
the divorce between them has already taken 
place ? that they are no longer natural and 
beautiful counterparts? and that one is de- 
graded to an amusement, while the other is 
given a mysterious, supernatural character, too 
lofty to be approached save through labor, 
social science, and worship? When literature 
loses faith in itself as the interpreter of man's 
being and all we know of divine and of nature, 
its degradation is complete. It begins then 
to be capricious, without dignity, or motive, 
except emolument and amusement. Then 
men put themselves in training to write a 



LITERARY ART. 



157 



book, as the athlete to develop a particular 
muscle. They study men and women and 
nature at strange and unfrequented points, 
and ransack the world for novelties to write 
about. They make literature a profession and 
business, and follow it after professional and 
business principles. I deny the name of liter- 
ature, though obliged to use it, to their work. 
And before we discussed literary art, would it 
not have been well to have settled whether 
there were any longer room for or need of 
such an art? 

PAINTER. 

All the more necessary we should preserve 
its traditions. This is not the first age in 
which its principles have been obscured. 
They have survived periods of barbarism, lux- 
urious and corrupt civilization, of ignorance, 
of religions that considered them devices of 
the devil, Virgil a wizard, and Horace profane. 
We still show the greatest interest in famous 



158 LITERARY ART. 

authors. We want to know how they live and 
look, and if they keep the ten commandments. 
And lately, that their genius may not be quite 
so oppressive to us, there has been a reve- 
lation in regard to environment, and we have 
discovered also the law of heredity, which re- 
lieves us of the necessity of considering our 
great men at all remarkable ; distributing their 
gift along seven generations, one contribution 
from that, another from this, you see how 
neatly, and unsuspected, we can deprive the 
latest representative of much credit for what 
he may have accomplished. That there 

should be such a man as Mr. cannot 

be left unaccounted for. Twenty times a 
year I read the ancestral explanation, which 
seems to me always to say: My dear sir, 
you had a remarkable grandfather and a 
remarkable great-grandfather, and grand- 
mothers are always remarkable, and it is 
not very, only a little, remarkable that you are 
remarkable. So while we have this deep per- 



LITERARY ART. 



iS9 



sonal interest in the men who create literature, 
I think there is hope for us. 

POET. 

Wait until we get back to Boston and I will 
find several who will answer your naughty 
insinuations about our own great writers. 
They know physiology there, and can give the 
intellectual pedigree of every one of their 
superior men. 

But, seriously, it is true there is a new 
book every day concerning some one of them, 
or those of other lands. We like to read about 
them more than in them. It is an age of in- 
formation — to what purpose, I don't know, 
unless to be well-informed, as it is called, the 
cheapest substitute for knowing, and heaven 
deliver us from it! In vain did Socrates riddle 
its pretensions ; it holds its head higher than 
ever. It goes hard with us now to confess 
that we do not know what we have never 
learned. You can now secure the title of au- 



1 60 LITERAR Y ART. 

thor, if you will write a book about some au- 
thor. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I cannot let you go on so severely. Where 
would it end but in the tub of Diogenes and 
absolute negation ? Whether true or false, op- 
timism is the only tolerable view of mankind ; 
it at least preserves something in us salutary 
and sweet. Any other puts out the desire of 
life. Let us even overlook the facts, if they be 
offensive and discouraging. 

" See thou nothing that is base" was written 
by a poet of our day ; it was the practice of 
the most celebrated ancient men. They lifted 
their eyes from the earth ; but benefited it 
more by what they saw and reported than do 
those who go on all fours, mousing in every 
pestiferous recess. There are unquestionable 
maladies, and the doctors are too plentiful, 
and the remedies. Nature contrives remedies, 
ameliorations ; when these fail, extinctions. 
We forget her silent, moderate, calculated 



LITER A R Y ART. \ 6 1 

medicaments, and fain would double the dose, 
or change the prescription. There are cycles 
in the world's intelligence, action and reaction ; 
improvement and progress can seldom be seen 
except at the transition points. The bad goes 
its course to its hour of triumph, when it au- 
daciously shows its full face, and is suddenly 
overthrown and forgotten. Literary fashions 
tend to the same extremes; their immense 
pretensions, their monopoly of public atten- 
tion, are the marks of their temporary char- 
acter. All the while much exists, and some- 
thing is being prepared, that justifies litera- 
ture. To this all defer, even while they give 
themselves to the others. There are always 
somewhere publishers who will take the risks 
of reprinting a good old book, although facing 
an almost certain loss. Schiller said pub- 
lishers should make their money on worthless 
books, and print the better for love and hon- 
or's sake. And there are some who will 

buy the best for its own sake, although 
ii 



1 62 LITERAR Y ART. 

never reading it. This confidence and respect 
are tokens of fealty, like those to a sovereign, 
somewhat useless and empty, but significant 
and splendid. Is it not a higher honor to 
stand age after age upon the shelf unread than 
to lie dog-eared or gilded on the centre-table 
for a season, devoured, lauded — and forgotten ? 
I know the answer the artist would make : 
that one were of as little worth as the other. 
But I incline toward a distant reverence, main- 
tained and spontaneous, rather than an im- 
petuous and fickle embrace. And I should 
choose never to be read than to be read and 
forgotten. 

PAINTER. 

Then you would cut off one of the chief and 
least harmful of amusements, writing and read- 
ing the lighter sorts of literature ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

No; not if they will call themselves what 
they are, and not push out the more honorable 



LIT ERA RY ART. \ 63 

guests at the banquet. We need all kinds of 
resources to get through life pleasantly ; the 
newest story and verse are good for a tonic 
or sedative. Indeed, I wish I knew how to 
write them myself ; then when I want recrea- 
tion and change I should not be driven to 
read other peoplels. For composing must be 
much more entertaining than reading them. 
Do you know the Miller of Mountainville ? I 
recommend him to you if you wish to obtain a 
good projection of literature, and know what it 
seems to be to the average citizen in active 
life. The miller has not seen much of the 
world, but he has made good use of the speci- 
mens he has observed. He has read more than 
common among his class, and has a hoard of 
maxims as well as original opinions on various 
subjects, unusual to the illiterate. I asked him 
once for his ideas on poetry : he did not un- 
derstand how full-grown men wrote it ; it was 
easier to see why people like to read poetry. 
He thought poets must continue to be boys, 



164 LITERAR Y ART. 

never outgrowing the love of sport. Even in 
the more serious sorts of poetry he found their 
toys and games, somewhat masked, yet too 
sportive and exuberant for men with families 
and a living to earn. It might be well to know 
how to write poetry, as to swim, in case of 
accident ; or to have any accomplishments that 
would occupy an idle hour. If a man broke 
his leg, and was laid up awhile, as he had been 
once, it would be a pleasant amusement to 
compose verses. He did try, and though 
those he had read in books seemed easy 
enough to write, he found it more difficult 
than he had any idea of ; he found what he 
contrived to put together was not even very 
good prose ; and then so many capital let- 
ters ! like sacks of grain standing on end in a 
row. He had heard Greek books did not use 
them, and it would be well to adopt this 
custom, and see, with that finger-post re- 
moved, whether we could find the metre and 
music. And what a waste of paper in margins ! 



LITERAR Y ART. 165 

There was some knack about the whole busi- 
ness which he was too old to learn, and which 
confirmed him in his belief that poets were 
forever young and made a business of pas- 
time. 

POET. 

No doubt in a country like ours, those who 
set up to be poets must seem to your average 
citizen the idlest, if not the maddest of mor- 
tals, until they have succeeded. And how few 
succeed ! So that a kind of mild odium at- 
taches to the whole business. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

To me the failures of poets are more inter- 
esting than any kind of success. 

PAINTER. 

Don't let your notion get abroad, or you will 
be deluged with the failures of all the obscure 
poetasters in the country. 



j 66 LIT ERA R Y ART. 



PHILOSOPHER. 



However absurd it may seem to you, I al- 
ways look for a new revelation, even in a news- 
paper corner, from a new poet. What if I am 
frequently disappointed, and it turn out to be 
a familiar, threadbare tune ! My expectation 
does not diminish. There is one measure for 
success ; I hold there should be a more gen- 
erous one for aims of a higher kind, though 
never reached. And I think it altogether un- 
just that poets alone, among men who endeavor 
anything, should, unless they gain the supreme 
seats of fame, lie under the scorn of gods and 
men. 

POET. 

Your sentiment is very soothing and inspir- 
iting to me. I like to feel there are those alive 
who read after your manner. The majority 
read with long-established reputations in their 
eye and can see nothing less ; nor do they stop 
to recognize a similar though fainter light. I 



LITERARY ART. 



167 



want the way left open through life. If there 
be genius and industry in the true poet, there 
is also that extreme sensitiveness which the 
favor of the public can help to blossom into 
the perfect flower, or untimely cut down. The 
old gardeners said that the herb, Sweet Basil, 
for successful cultivation needed to be stroked 
by fair and gentle hands. And so does the 
poet. There is an immense impulse, almost in- 
spiration, in the knowledge that one has writ, 
ten something which is read and treasured, even 
by ever so few. For this reason, on account 
of this secret help, it is not best to waive pub- 
lication too long. I am aware of the author- 
ities adverse to this. They tell you to keep 
until every point is perfect ; to hunt a week 
for a word. But writing is just as apt, like 
wine, to become flat and overaged by keeping 
as to be improved. Improvement is more sure 
to accompany a new attempt than the long 
bending over an unpublished work. One be- 
comes encumbered by his own papers, and 



1 68 LITER A R Y AR T. 

needs to clear his table and his mind by print- 
ing or burning. Fire is the more heroic, but 
it leaves an uncertainty, and the experiment of 
facing the public still to be tried. There is 
nothing like the cold lead of types to test your 
vigor, to project your work where your own 
personality does not so strongly color and con- 
fuse the judgment. I know if you happen to 
become famous, the public hunts up your ear- 
lier performances, and prefers to comment on 
your first imperfections than to note your 
progress. 

PAINTER. 

What an inundation of verse we should have, 
if your loose views generally prevailed. I 
know a dozen manuscripts that would rush 
into print, if the severe restraints now imposed 
upon poetry should be removed. It would 
become as ephemeral as other w r riting ; but, 
under the canons established by ages of expe- 
rience, it is kept in a lofty and immortal pre- 
cinct by being permitted no existence what- 



LITER A R Y ART. 1 69 

ever, unless it be wholly divine and perfect. 
You forget that the readers of poetry can do 
without it better than you, who think your- 
selves poets, can do without writing. Luxu- 
ries we want the best of, or none. We can 
economize on necessities. We pull through 
bad prose in search of knowledge. But in 
poetry we expect to be drawn, to be almost 
compelled, not by anything we happen to be 
in want of, but because it creates a thousand 
unappeasable and more than earthly desires. 
And we are not satisfied to have this done in 
a bungling and experimental manner. Nobody 
wants a young doctor or a new poet. I con- 
fess how either ever climbs up is mysterious. 
Perhaps idle and slender ladies, give a fash- 
ionable repute to the one ; and those whose 
sympathies are more active than their per- 
ceptions, help to incubate the other. How- 
ever, for the young writer who sets out to 
make poetry or fiction his field, his own study 
is the best place for a long time ; like Haw- 



170 



LITERARY ART. 



thorne, in his Salem chamber, "keeping the 
dew of his youth, and the freshness of his 
heart ;" or like Milton, who describes himself 
as for five years trying his wings in solitude. 
There he may draw in such friendly and wise 
critics as good fortune sends. But for the 
most part he must be his own audience ; his 
pen must be his friend and censor, to begin 
and to blot, over and over again ; suffering 
nothing to escape him, seizing every mood, 
postponing nothing, studious of the meaning 
of life and its most excellent records in liter- 
ature. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I fear such a sublimated existence might 
proye unhealthy. Is it not better to establish 
relations with the world as soon as possible, 
as our friend has said? 

PAINTER. 

I see that I no sooner change my position 
a little than you also change. I am glad to 



LITERARY ART. 



171 



bring you to reason, by exaggerating some- 
what your ideas, so that you may see whither 
they tend. I do indeed believe the form in 
which an idea first clothes itself is likely to be 
the best ; and that a certain bloom we call 
style may escape by too much plumb-line and 
cubit. The evil of these is that you acquire a 
habit of measuring in a single way, and stand 
in danger of becoming a mannerist. The 
good of the other is its variety and freshness, 
and it will also bear up more easily a few mis- 
takes, a little dullness. But who wishes to ex- 
plain or declare laws for the poet who is a 
natural law-breaker? There's another resem- 
blance to boys which your miller should have 
noticed. They claim their protection so long 
as they do not wish to violate them ; then, 
like Achilles and Antigone, they say laws were 
not made for them. Because they pursue a 
species of work, which indeed has something 
godlike in it, they think themselves exempt 
from all precept and precedent. 



I72 LITERARY ART. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

I was about to ask you, thinking of this and 
other high-sounding names you give to poetry, 
whether you believe poetry an immortal art, 
or that, having seen its best days, it is now 
about to decay and give place to science or 
some other forms of intellectual activity ? 

PAINTER. 

Some of the greatest living scientific men 
have already given to poetry the credit of hav- 
ing foreshadowed their discoveries and deduc- 
tions. It runs on a little way ahead of all 
science and other arts, making a great number 
of observations, offspring of sentiment and 
prescience, which the chances of life and new 
movements in human thought realize in man- 
ifold adaptations. They are like handsome 
glasses which you may fill with flowers or 
wine, or useful things, which even empty are 
ornamental. Yes ; I think poetry an immortal 



LITERARY ART. 



173 



art, if you mean to ask whether it will continue 
to be cultivated by a few, and delighted in by 
nearly all. If we shall carry it away with us, 
who can tell ? Some say we shall continue to 
have only what we most completely possess 
here ; others, that precisely what we have not 
here we die in order to obtain. Both views 
are consoling: the one to the fortunate, the 
other to the unfortunate. However, it is best 
to beware of all doctrines concerning the pres- 
ent or future made by the prosperous or the 
suffering. They are vitiated by experience. 
Something that is not experience, nor reason, 
is sometimes a safer guide. What is there 
in such inquiries in which we have no personal 
interest ? If we could find that, it would be a 
higher guide. Of the arts, it has always seemed 
to me that music might remain with us after 
this life. For that, the more we are moved by 
it, the more are we reminded of something un- 
attainable by us here, and yet for which we 
have a dim, mysterious capacity. 



1 74 LITERAR Y AR T. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

That may be said of almost all our sensa- 
tions and perceptions; the more acute they 
are, the more they open into a world where 
we cannot follow ; the oftener they touch a 
certain boundary, which is for them a limit in 
the present, but not for the objects them- 
selves. We are not y,et perfectly equipped for 
following whither they lead. 

POET. 

What do you think that equipment is likely 
to consist in ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Intelligence. 

POET. 

And nothing more ? Will there be no soft- 
er garment, no flowers to twine in Urania's 

tresses ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

No ; you have observed they are more 
closely bound than those of any other god- 



LITERARY ART. 



175 



dess ; and like her sister's, Pallas Minerva, 
who sometimes deigns to visit this earth. 

The theories of good and evil, of benevo- 
lence and beneficence, in short, of love rather 
than intelligence, in the creation, cannot sus- 
tain the conclusions of modern thought, and 
we return to the ancient. Has any one ever 
made a consoling explanation to you of the 
mutual destruction, of the universal predatory 
instinct, that reigns from the bottom to the 
top of nature? It is an arrangement of 
economies, necessary but revolting. Its only 
profit is as a field for the exercise of intel- 
ligence ; in studying an intelligible contriv- 
ance. Yet man has bettered nature at some 
points ; and is, on the whole, more humane. 
He will, at a pinch, stop a kingdom for a 
benevolent purpose; nature will not stay an 
atom of dust. Several times in his history has 
he outgrown the gods of his beliefs, and with 
them his ideas of life. But never has he been 
able to disassociate these two, between which 



I y6 LITER A R Y AR T. 

he finds an intelligible relation. What it is 
may be irregularly revealed by love; but intel- 
ligence holds a steadier light. 

POET. 
You think then intelligence is all that is 
securely left to us ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 
Yes ; to know actual existence, though we 
cannot account for it, may not seem much like 
knowing, yet at length it will open its secret 
to us, if we do not close the door by some 
piously apologetic interpretation. And then, 
it is much safer than feeling and sentiment, 
which always either bemoan, or refuse to see, 
realities. 

PAINTER. 

I am delighted to find you coming out such 

a realist. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

With poets it is almost necessary to keep 
one's balance. It is permissible for youth to 



LITERARY ART, 



177 



like and attach itself to a thousand things 
which it does not in the least understand. But 
in manhood we cannot afford to indulge in 
illusions. We may now and then turn our 
faces toward the unknowable, but only to keep 
us from arrogance and conceit. 

PAINTER. 

But is not this just what poetry is contin- 
ually doing; and often successfully? It seems 
to me you do not carefully enough maintain 
the distinctions between science and those arts 
more or less dependent on the imagination, 
which is a co-ordinate faculty with reason. 
They labor harmoniously, and all goes well 
unless one falls to calling the other naught. 
One sees what the other feels, and it is not 
necessary to accuse one of illusion, because it 
uses assertion in place of reasoning. Poetry 
deals in the self-evident ; in things no sooner 
said than seen to be true. Philosophy assumes 
the self-evident, and employs itself in proving 



i;8 



LITERARY ART. 



it, picking up on the way many truths. I 
value it not so much for its noble intention, 
as for the freedom and light which have ever, 
unawares, accompanied its exercise. 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Let us not claim too large results for any 
species of intellectual activity. Otherwise we 
shall give undue weight to authority, and more 
and more limit our hopes and endeavors. We 
ought to feel that there is no work of the rea- 
son or the imagination which is yet perfect, 
and not content ourselves with writing their 
biographies. 

POET. 

Are there not perfect models in poetry? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

There may be, but no one is permitted to 

follow them. One of a kind, not two, is the 

rule, at least in the fine arts. Do you not see 

what room and hope this leaves, instead of 



LITERARY ART. 



179 



exclusion and despair? And a man ought to 
be deeply thankful that he is not permitted to 
repeat himself even, without loss of reputation. 

POET. 
How can he help it, if he gives himself to 
one kind of work ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

By choosing the right kind. 

The path by which you enter literature or 
art is as important as that by which you enter 
life. It has as deep a moral significance and 
results ; nay, deeper, for in one you may re- 
cover false steps, but in the other it is impos- 
sible. How many writers commit themselves 
to what must at last become servitude and 
depression ! Begin so that you can 

"Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime." 
I think then literary art, if one choose his 
work with discretion, will come swiftly to 
his aid. How much can you hold ? Of cer- 
tain things you may fill and refill yourself 



1 80 LITER A R Y AR T. 

and become no greater; of others, if you fill, 
you become continually enlarged and more 
and more productive. It is not now as in 
former ages, when men seem to have uncon- 
sciously absorbed the ideas and images of their 
time and country, and spontaneously repro- 
duced them. But with us there is no longer 
simple faith, positive symbol, and prescribed 
form to direct the artist and assure public 
attention. For us there is absolute freedom 
in choice of subject and manner of treatment. 
Hence the importance of the choice, and the 
dangers of caprice and dilettanteism ; the dan- 
ger while we reject ancient models of forgetting 
the fundamental principles on which they were 
based, and on which we must be based to be 
secure of rightly interesting and delighting 
mankind. Gifts and art must coexist, or nei- 
ther avail. The issue will lie largely exposed 
to the uncertainties of the public taste or some 
casual tendency ; but such decision is not always 
final and conclusive. A few sometimes award 



LITERARY ART. ^i 

the verdict which, after a long period, many- 
confirm. Some inward light will also encour- 
age the writer who has opened a true foun- 
tain ; like this stream, it will run into a larger, 
and finally into the boundless ocean. So that 
his way is as clear as that of other mortals 
who undertake labors inspired by nature or 
necessity or their own choice. Let him listen 
and challenge three voices : the larger public's, 
the smaller, made up of friends and compan- 
ions, but most of all, his own. 

But is it not time for us to depart ? 

PAINTER. 

Yes ; and we have said enough. But is it 
not usual for strangers to leave here some 
memorial of their visit ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

We have not time to cut an Indian totem, 
such as I suppose used to mark the wander- 



182 LITERARY ART. 

ings and camping of the aborigines along this 
grass-grown river. Let us rather take a token 
with us. 

PAINTER. 
What shall it be ? 

PHILOSOPHER. 

Some wish or prayer to good fortune for an 
intellectual gift ; and another to the divinity 
within us that we may learn from it how to 
use the gift with intelligence, with freedom and 
with reverence. 



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